The Department of Commerce Needs More Money to Modernize the Census, Secretary Says

The Census Bureau wants to modernize the way it collects data from citizens but without new money from Congress it won’t be able to do that, Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker said at the Consumer Electronics Show.

“We need to do the census differently than we have been over the past 40 years,” Sec Pritzker said. “We have, today, the technology that allows for a much more cost efficient census “But we have to test those efforts. In order to test those efforts we need to have the money…You have to spend money to save money. We’re in the middle of conversations with appropriators about whether we’re going to have the money.” Census outlined a plan in December to allow field surveyors to fill out citizen information using their own smartphones and tablets with Census providing only the application and security for those surveys. The first phase of that plan was to outfit surveyors with 1,200 iPhones to test whether the Census could efficiently and securely collect surveys on the Apple platform.