Winehole23
08-30-2020, 12:51 PM
...is the biggest story no one's really talking about.
The Census has real world consequences for apportionment and federal funding to states and localities.
Katherine Wallman — who retired in 2017 after close to 25 years as the chief statistician within the White House Office of Management and Budget, overseeing the federal government's statistical policies — worries that skepticism about the quality of 2020 census data could taint public perception about the reliability ofother critical information the federal government releases that is based in part on census data.
"We're actually endangering all of government statistics because it just feeds the notion," Wallman says, "that those guys, they just make up the numbers, right?"
Wallman, who was part of the approval process for the 2000 and 2010 census forms, says she finds the rush to produce the 2020 results amid the pandemic perplexing.
"I am not finding any rationale that I can accept as an objective reason for rushing through, ending up with crummy data and destroying the trust in a system that depends almost entirely on the voluntary cooperation of the American public," Wallman says.
https://www.npr.org/2020/08/29/905846761/the-census-scales-back-a-critical-step-checking-its-own-work
The Census has real world consequences for apportionment and federal funding to states and localities.
Katherine Wallman — who retired in 2017 after close to 25 years as the chief statistician within the White House Office of Management and Budget, overseeing the federal government's statistical policies — worries that skepticism about the quality of 2020 census data could taint public perception about the reliability ofother critical information the federal government releases that is based in part on census data.
"We're actually endangering all of government statistics because it just feeds the notion," Wallman says, "that those guys, they just make up the numbers, right?"
Wallman, who was part of the approval process for the 2000 and 2010 census forms, says she finds the rush to produce the 2020 results amid the pandemic perplexing.
"I am not finding any rationale that I can accept as an objective reason for rushing through, ending up with crummy data and destroying the trust in a system that depends almost entirely on the voluntary cooperation of the American public," Wallman says.
https://www.npr.org/2020/08/29/905846761/the-census-scales-back-a-critical-step-checking-its-own-work