WASHINGTON (AP) - The budget fight between Congress and the Bush administration is threatening the accuracy of the 2010 census, the Census Bureau's director said Tuesday.
Census Director Charles Louis Kincannon said important testing scheduled for next year will have to be scaled back or canceled unless the bureau receives a quick infusion of money. Without the tests, accuracy will suffer, he said.
'We can't just fly blind into 2010 using a complicated system,' Kincannon said in an interview.
Congress has not completed work on any of the dozen spending bills appropriating money for the day-to-day operations of 15 Cabinet departments, even though the new fiscal year started Monday. Instead, Congress approved a temporary spending bill last week that funds most government agencies at last year's levels for the next six weeks.
The Census Bureau's budget has not been contentious, but it has been left unresolved while President Bush and congressional leaders fight about overall spending levels.
Bush has threatened to veto nine of the 12 spending bills because of attempts by Democrats in Congress to add more than $22 billion to his $933 billion request.
Kincannon said the temporary spending bill provides the Census Bureau with about half the money it would receive under the president's proposed budget. The bureau has to start planning for the once-a-decade count years in advance, and its budget typically increases significantly.
'You can't buy time. If we get the money in six weeks, we have lost six weeks and we can never make that up, and that doesn't change the date of the census,' Kincannon said.
Accuracy is important because the 10-year count is used to apportion seats in Congress and state legislatures, and to distribute billions of dollars in federal money each year.
The 2010 census, projected to cost $11.5 billion, will be the first in which workers going door-to-door will use hand-held computers to collect information about the public. The bureau is to buy about 500,000 of the computers, which are to be tested in a large-scale dress rehearsal scheduled for next spring.
But Kincannon said the computers won't be ready unless the Census Bureau starts paying the supplier soon. He said abandoning the computers and returning to paper forms would add about $1.5 billion to the cost of the census.
Kincannon said he is already planning to scale back the dress rehearsal, and could cancel it if the budget stalemate goes beyond six weeks. Kincannon said the Census Bureau has held dress rehearsals for each census since he started at the bureau before the 1970 count.
Six House Democrats wrote a letter to the president's budget director Tuesday complaining that the Bush administration didn't request additional money for the Census Bureau in the temporary spending bill.
'This is the last chance to test the vast changes in the census design -- what the administration touts as the 're-engineered census,' wrote the lawmakers, led by Rep. William Lacy Clay, D-Mo., chairman of the subcommittee that oversees the census.
The lawmakers asked for assurances that the Census Bureau will be exempt from administration spending restrictions.
Kincannon, who submitted his resignation as director nearly 11 months ago, said he was frustrated by the budgeting process in Washington. President Bush has nominated Texas demographer Steve Murdock to replace Kincannon, but Kincannon continues to run the agency while Murdock awaits Senate confirmation.
'I believe that both parties, the executive and the legislature, they assume that if we eventually get the money we will figure out a way,' Kincannon said.
'Either we have not been successful in conveying the urgency of this, or we are not believed when we're heard,' he said. 'This town doesn't work very well.'
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