By Tara Bahrampour May 9 at 4:14 PM
The director of the U.S. Census Bureau is resigning, leaving the agency leaderless at a time when it faces a crisis over funding for the 2020 decennial count of the U.S. population and beyond.
John H. Thompson, who has served as director since 2013 and worked for the bureau for 27 years before that, will leave June 30, the Commerce Department announced Tuesday.
The news, which surprised census experts, follows an April congressional budget allocation for the census that critics say is woefully inadequate. And it comes less than a week after a prickly hearing at which Thompson told lawmakers that cost estimates for a new electronic data collection system had ballooned by nearly 50 percent.
“It’s like two trains going down the track toward each other, with Republicans decrying the budget overrun and Democrats saying the census has been underfunded,” Phil Sparks, co-director of the Census Project, a watchdog organization, said of the May 3 hearing before the House Appropriations subcommittee on commerce, justice and science. “This puts the census in the crosshairs both ways.”
No successor for Thompson was announced. A Commerce Department spokesperson said an acting director would be designated “in the coming days” and the position would be filled permanently “in due course.”
The decennial count typically requires a massive ramp-up in spending in the years immediately preceding it, involving extensive testing, hiring and publicity. However, in late April Congress approved only $1.47 billion for the Census Bureau in the 2017 fiscal year, about 10 percent below what the Obama administration had requested. And experts say the White House’s proposed budget for 2018, $1.5 billion, falls far below what is needed.
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Neither Census Bureau nor Commerce Department officials responded to questions about why Thompson is leaving now and whether his departure was unexpected. His five-year term expired in December, but he had been widely expected to stay on through at least the end of this year.
“I saw him as recently as two weeks ago, he was feeling very good about where things were, so I must say that this comes as a surprise, and a sad surprise, that he would feel he needed to do this,” said Kenneth Prewitt, who was director during the lead-up to the 2000 Census, when Thompson was associate director. “He’s a very, very competent man.”
In announcing Thompson’s retirement, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross thanked him for his three decades of public service, adding, “Your experience will be greatly missed.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/social-issues/us-census-director-resigns-amid-turmoil-over-funding-of-2020-count/2017/05/09/8f8657c6-34ea-11e7-b412-62beef8121f7_story.html
