The future of a planned US$600 million (C$685) handheld
deployment by the U.S. Census Bureau is in question.
It's the result of the fiscal 2007 funding bills approved by the
House and Senate, which both reduced the White House's requested
amount for census operations.
Although a conference committee won't determine the final budget
numbers until later this year, Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) plans to
hold a special hearing on Thursday to discuss the census budget.
Wolf chairs a subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee
that oversees the U.S. Department of Commerce and the Census
Bureau.
One of the topics to be considered at the hearing is whether the
proposed funding bills would threaten the planned rollout of
500,000 wireless handheld devices for census takers to
use during the 2010 national census, an aide to Wolf said last
week.
Wolf said the reduced funding approved by the House and Senate
"would be devastating" to the Census Bureau, although he didn't
specify that the cuts would automatically kill the handheld
project.
Gauging the impact
Census Bureau officials wouldn't comment about the proposed
reductions or the future of the handheld project, saying only that
they are monitoring the ongoing budget process. The handheld
rollout plans remain intact for now, a bureau spokesman said.
The spokesman said that the bureau sent an impact statement
about the proposed budget cuts to House members in June. But he
wouldn't disclose any of the impact statement's contents because it
hasn't been released publicly.
The White House initially proposed funding of US$878 million for
Census Bureau operations in fiscal 2007, which starts Oct. 1. The
House last month approved a budget proposal that would give the
bureau $824 million, while the Senate last week set its funding
level at $828 million.
The Census Bureau in April awarded a five-year contract for the
handheld rollout to a team of vendors led by Harris Corp. The
pocket-size devices are slated to run Windows Mobile 5.0 and be
made by a manufacturer in Taiwan. Census officials have said that
the use of handhelds should save "millions of dollars" by reducing
the time it takes to gather data, improving its accuracy and
minimizing the need to process paper census forms.
But the costs of the handheld program and the census process as
a whole have been called into question by Sen. Tom Coburn
(R-Okla.), chairman of a subcommittee on federal financial
management. He has urged the bureau to conduct the census online,
following the practice of Canada and several other countries.
Coburn is concerned about projections that the 2010 census will
cost more than $11 billion, almost twice the cost of the 2000
census, an aide said last week.
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