Next January, the U.S. Census Bureau will be opening an office in Dallas that will coordinate efforts in a dozen states mostly throughout the south and mid-west. The San Antonio Express News picked up that tidbit during a Tuesday meeting of the Alamo City Council of Governments. But there’s a solid bit of irony written into all this: While the Census plans to staff the Dallas office with new hires and relocate existing ones, it won’t be able to bring anyone on until President Donald Trump lifts his federal hiring freeze. Eventually and ideally, this new regional location will house 200 workers.
The data from the 2020 Census goes well beyond cataloguing populations—it’s used to determine whether a state’s population growth or decline warrants additional or fewer seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. It helps inform the amount of federal dollars that fall to the individual states for things like Medicaid and highways and housing vouchers. This is the big one, constitutionally mandated to be performed once every decade. In 2010, a record 74 percent of households returned their Census paperwork by mail. The rest were counted by workers on the ground. Considering that Texas alone grew by about 11 percent from 2010 to 2016 (that’s about 2.7 million new people, give or take), the footwork required may very well jump in 2020.
The existing regional office is in Denver, and the Express News reports that it won’t be going anywhere. But San Antonio Mayor Ivy Taylor is already pushing preparation, whether those federal workers can get hired or not:
“We can’t wait until the last minute,” said Taylor, who has a master’s degree in city and regional planning. “We want to have everybody around the community mobilized and ready to get out and get an accurate count for our community.”
