What exactly does the Census Bureau spend $982 million on?
By John Crudele
January 15, 2015 | 1:36am
New York PostNow that The Post has assisted the Census Bureau in fixing problems it was having gathering honest economic data, we’d like to help some more.
So this week, we are asking for information on how the Census Bureau spends the millions of dollars given to it each year by taxpayers.
We are requesting, under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), details on no-bid contracts given out by Census. I’m told some of these contracts are called “pass through” contracts, which means that higher-ups don’t need to sign off on them.
The Post’s lawyers filed the FOIA request this week.
The Commerce Department oversees Census, which conducts vital surveys for many government agencies. As my readers already know, I’ve been investigating quality breaches in Census data for the past year.
Now, I want to know about the money. According to Commerce, in 2014, “the Census Bureau request[ed] appropriations for domestic discretionary spending totaling $982.5 million.”
That’s a whole lot of dough being spent on someone’s whim. And that is just part of what Census spends each year.
Since we don’t want to overburden the redactors at Commerce, we are requesting only contracts given out over the last seven years through the Philadelphia and Chicago regions of Census. There are six regions in all, but we’ll leave the other four alone for now.
Why Chicago? You might remember that the Chicago regional director — who was apparently tight with Illinois politicians — was “removed” from his job late last year. And Census won’t tell us why.
So we’d like to take a look at how Chicago is spending taxpayer money.
The Philadelphia region is where we caught someone cheating on data collection — an event that has led to congressional and Inspector General investigations. The probes resulted in reforms despite the fact that Commerce “obstructed” the congressional probe.
Philly is also where two inspectors were caught falsifying expense reports, a case that almost led to jail terms before the gods of leniency inexplicably blessed the culprits. And it’s where a bunch of computers suddenly went MIA right before the last presidential election.
I hear there might already be a surprise audit going on in Philly.
We’d also like to see if there are any more deals like the one that gives the University of Maryland millions of dollars a year — plus tuition payments — despite the fact that a whistle-blower (the person in charge of the contract) has told Commerce that the deal was inappropriate. The former head of Census used to teach at the school.
What are we looking for?
Everything: possible cushy deals with social service organizations that are being back-doored money through Census, inappropriate bonuses that discretion says shouldn’t have been given, and questionable internships.
I can see the stone walls going up already.
