>“Some things are going to be delayed,” said Lachanski, who also serves as a senior advisor in the Commerce Department, which oversees the Census Bureau. “We’re trying to adhere as closely as we can to product release schedules.”
A pity Congress won't investigate what will be delayed and for how long.
>Cook said the decision on privacy protections was made at the level of the Commerce Secretary’s office, and the Census Bureau just provided technical advice.
>“The Census Bureau basically interacted on a kind of technical and advisory basis for the department,” Cook said.
Did anyone involved with writing the Order know what they were doing?
>Work on the analysis was not conducted by career civil servants at the Census Bureau, and the team behind it included individuals affiliated with the America First Policy Institute, a think tank started by officials from Trump's first administration, according to a Census Bureau employee who NPR has agreed not to name because they fear retaliation at work.
Some Census Bureau employees must have helped, even they did not imagine the project.
>Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Census Bureau relied in part on statistical imputation – using statistics such as administrative records or data for nearby households to predict what missing data would be – instead of direct contact to count people for the 2020 census.
No. According to the Encyclopedia of the U.S. Census, imputation has been used since the 1940 Census.
>The Tuesday evening meeting attracted more than 100 people, most of them Black, to a conference room at Itawamba Community College in Belden.
>The sources are the USCIS immigration record system (green cards and lawful-permanent-resident status), State Department immigrant and nonimmigrant visa issuances, ICE records (foreign students, removals, and national-docket proceedings), USCIS DACA approvals, and the Social Security Administration’s legal-alien citizenship codes.
>For the election study, the Census Bureau noted, “the team conducting this beginning analysis did not have access to the names of the population analyzed or any other identifying information.”
Few Census Bureau Headquarters employees working with computer files ever see human names. Upstream, a small number of trusted employees replace names with Master Address File IDs and household person numbers or, as described below, PIKs. With these identifiers, records may be matched or linked as needed. The names are not lost; they are securely stored in computer files few Census Bureau employees can access. The names can be retrieved. Of course, everything depends on true PIK assignment. If any of the say, 18 Houston residents named Juan Jose Garcia who share the same date of birth, get confused, the admin recs don't get properly "resolved to a single anonymous person identifier".
>This beginning brief draws on the DataClear 2020 commercial voter file and a set of federal administrative records, all resolved to a single anonymous person identifier, the Census Bureau’s Protected Identification Key (PIK)