Census Monitoring Board
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Written by Steve Jost
Then Associate Director for Communications at the U.S. Census Bureau
Protecting the Constitutionally Mandated Census
As happened often in his career, the White House reached out to Tony to help solve a problem, this one that had plagued President Clinton, preventing GOP micromanaging of the 2000 Census.
In advance of the 2000 decennial count, the Census Bureau announced a new plan to correct historical undercounts of communities of color, rural areas, and children. It involved a scientifically proven new method to use “sampling,” a statistical method to estimate these historically undercounted populations. Unique in the world, the American census requires counting every person resident in the country, because it drives representation through the drawing of new political boundaries every ten years. Despite herculean efforts of the census takers, lower income, less educated and underserved communities, especially those of color,
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get missed. Even President George Washington complained that the first count in 1790 understated the population of the fledgling nation. The new science of sampling would help improve the count for 2000.
"I am working to ensure that the 2000 Census is the most accurate census using the best, most up-to-date scientific methods at the most efficient use of taxpayers’ dollars," the President said. "In the 1990 Census, millions of Americans were missed especially children, minorities, and residents in urban and rural communities.”
Enter one of Tony’s perpetual rivals, Newt Gingrich. He and the House GOP filed suit, in a case that eventually made it’s way to the Supreme Court. They also included language in appropriations legislation that would prohibit the use of sampling in Census 2000 or the expenditure of funds for Census 2000 sampling-related planning activities.
Debate over the sampling issue postponed passage of the Commerce Department's 1998 appropriations bill until the end of November 1997, two months into the new fiscal year. With the threat of a stalemate between the congressional leadership and the Clinton administration over the use of statistical sampling in Census 2000, the two sides reached a compromise in the enacted legislation. The legislation permitted the Census Bureau to continue to plan for sampling, while directing the agency to plan for a census without statistical sampling. This was later referred to as "dual track" planning.
The law also set up an eight-member "Census Monitoring Board" to observe and monitor all aspects of the planning and implementation of Census 2000. President Clinton named Tony to Chair the four Presidential members of the Monitoring Board, while Gingrich appointed four Congressional Members. Soon after on January 25, 1999, the Supreme Court held in the Gingrich lawsuit, Department of Commerce v. U.S. House of Representatives, that the Census Bureau's proposed plan to use statistical sampling in the decennial census for purposes of determining congressional apportionment violates the Census Act (the Census Bureau's authorizing statute).
Armed with that significant victory, Gingrich’s partisan appointees on the Monitoring Board vowed to scrutinize and disrupt every effort of the career professionals at Census to get a complete count. Housed in the basement of the Census Bureau headquarters, and armed with badges that gave them unprecedented access to internal meetings planning for the head count, they designed to sit in and observe every detail of census planning by the career professionals.
Instead, they found themselves racing to keep up with Tony and the aggressive agenda of field hearings and reports that his team produced. Throughout 1999 and 2000 the Monitoring Board held a variety of public meetings with invited expert witnesses and issued 15 research reports on census topics and the progress of the 2000 Decennial count. Much of the content helped local communities understand the causes behind the undercount and provided recipes for local outreach from trusted voices encouraging citizens to respond to the census. The Gingrich team were too busy trying to issue their own reports to meddle much with the plans.
In the end, the 2000 count proved to be the most accurate in history according to the Bush Administration that inherited the success of the Clinton management of the national head count. Tony and his Presidential colleagues on the Monitoring Board helped keep the census on track. The Census Monitoring Board Presidential members issued their final report on their oversight of the 2000 Decennial in September that year.