Census Bureau To Scrap Handhelds — Cost $3 Billion

GovTechGuy writes "The Census Bureau will tell a House panel today that it will drop plans to use handheld computers to help count Americans for the 2010 census, increasing the cost for the decennial census by as much as $3 billion, according to testimony the Commerce Department secretary plans to give this afternoon."

It's all borrowed anyway...

[bstarrfield]

Just another example of the mind boggling inefficiency and ineffectiveness of the current American administration. $3 billion dollars would cover roughly a week of expenses in Iraq - so the sum must be inconsequential.

Or - $3 billion dollars could pay for the college tuition of thousands of students, could dramatically raise NSF funding, or could help rebuild our roads. Don't these people even shame anymore?

One of the fun points about this is that the current Administration was elected (partially) on their supposed business expertise. Which appears to be actually true as many major businesses flub their own large scale IT projects.

Well - given that we're running a fantastic deficit, we'll just throw the extra costs of the the census project into our staggering debt.

$10/person ?!?

[vijayiyer]

It costs $10 _per person_ to count us? That's unbelievable. Perhaps if they just count people (as the Constitution requires) rather than gather race and demographic information, they could cut their costs.

Re:Surplus

[Otter]

That was my first thought too (Do they run Linux?) but I don't think they exist yet. It sounds like the $3 billion is mostly projected cost savings from the handhelds that won't be attained, not that there's $3 billion in handhelds sitting in a warehouse next to the Ark of the Covenant.

(BTW, does everyone now have hideous Reply to This buttons on their comment display or do I need to refresh something?)

Re:Census? Just count me out.

[zappepcs]

Welcome to the 21st century. There are some things that you might like to know about life here:

The local city or county authority knows who you are by your billing information, water usage, electric usage, and cars registered to your address. Additionally, what information is not known about you from your ISP can usually be garnered from the telephone people (they hear everything you know).

We use building permits to know how much activity is happening in new homes and home modifications and real estate records for sales of existing homes.

Put all that together with tax records, medical and insurance records and about the only thing we don't know about you is who at the last fucking piece of pizza (I wanted that for breakfast).

While total information awareness is only just now starting to take off, we already have a huge amount of data.

Back in 1893 (your time) it was necessary to collect information on residents because we just didn't have all this information before.

P.S. Governments are responsible for schools in the same way that they are responsible for ensuring enough public transportation. Insurance industries can tell us how many beds will be profitable and that has NOTHING to do with the number of people in the area.

Not sure where you are from, but around here I don't imagine that too many illegals actually participate in the census taking. For some reason TimeWarner is apparently convinced that there are enough of them to put on EXTRA Spanish language channels though. Wonder how they knew that without accurate census data?

Once again, welcome to 21st century America.

Re:Surplus

[hey!]

Well,not to excuse an other government IT debacle, you can't compare this to the stock taking apps you see on Intermecs and the like.

First of all, the information on a census is more complex than counting the numbers of SKUs. It also contains sensitive personal data -- not that private industry doesn't deal with that too, but it has a thoroughly dismal record of protecting privacy. Also, while some widget might not be in the right aisle, it's not likely you'll find a bunch of stuff in a store that you didn't put there, whereas a big part of the census is finding people you didn't know where there so they can be counted.

Like defense, the census does a lot of things that private agencies may do, but with a number of twists. That's why big government IT projects are often such bad news. It'd be better to do a one or two things incrementally, for example introduce PDAs and maybe GPS to handle some parts of the job for some census takers, then add more functionality and deploy more widely with every iteration. I mean, 600 million bucks? Who in his right mind would start this project with that much money? I'd start with maybe five or ten million for a pilot, and work my way up from there.

Of course, the federal contracting system is pretty much an invitation to inflate every contract a huge boondogle, but that's a different story. No politician goes to Washington promising to do a lot of small things that after three or four years will end up amounting to real progress. They all promise to go down there and shake things up, with the result that there's always a lot of shaking going on, but surprisingly little getting accomplished.