President Barack H. Obama, the man who promised to run the most open and ethical administration in history, who promised to rein in spending by going line by line through the budget, who promised to have no former lobbyists in his administration, who said his budget would contain no earmarks, has decided that he would remove oversight and administration of the 2010 Census from the Commerce Department and have it run from within the White House. A lot of people, including Don Campbell, think it's a bad idea to turn this important, once-a-decade count of our population into a political football. Read Don's article here.
Is the census that important? Why not just estimate, or even just pick a number? Consider this: Census data are used to distribute Congressional seats to states, to make decisions about what community services to provide, and to distribute $300 billion in federal funds to local, state and tribal governments each year.
Yeah, it's important. Too important to let politicians deal and mis-deal with it.
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