Postal Service-run Census Would be a Costly Mistake
The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) is uniquely adept at losing money. America’s mail carrier lost $9.5 billion in fiscal year 2024 and has shed more than $100 billion over the past fifteen years. And now, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is suggesting the USPS extend itself even further by taking over the U.S. Census.
Lutnick claims that a postal-run census would save tens of billions of taxpayer dollars because the agency “[already has] cars, already has gas, and goes to every household.” The truth is that this would likely lead to (even more) mail delays, invasions of privacy, and information theft. Instead of saddling the USPS with another responsibility they can’t manage, the federal government should fundamentally rethink how it counts the populace. In an age of extensive recordkeeping and digitization, going door-to-door is no longer necessary. The Census needs a makeover, not a game of hot potato to an agency that is burning money.
When the Founding Fathers first enshrined the “actual enumeration” of U.S. citizens into the Constitution, the only way of keeping track of the citizenry was by going through the land, appointing marshals to go district by district, household by household. But over the years, the country has grown and these methods are outdated. In fact, other countries have begun to realize that an “actual” count can be achieved by bringing together data already collected via various systems such as social safety nets. In more than a dozen European countries (i.e. Switzerland, Norway, Germany), bureaucrats cobble together data already on the books to create elaborate, linked records in master databases.
To see what this would look like in practice, consider how websites such as Ancestry.com help consumers find relatives past and present. Their master database contains wide-ranging records such as birth, marriage, and death certificates, as well as citizenship/naturalization documents. If the government wanted even more information in its “census” database, it could make use of more detailed records at its disposal such as tax records. The National Research Council has suggested that this could work, noting in a 1995 report that a “high proportion of the U.S. population is included in one or more existing administrative records … the coverage … may well expand in the future.”
It seems difficult for any alternative to do as thorough of a job as the current enumeration process. However, the current system fails to evenly account for all populations and will continue to encounter difficulties in counting illegal immigrants in a consistent way. Where the federal government has failed to get an accurate picture of the illegal immigrant population, private survey questions may prove to have better methods of encouraging people to come out of the shadows.
Even absent the politically charged immigration issue, some people simply refuse to be counted and repeatedly throw out questionnaires or refuse to answer their doors to the counters. It is far more feasible and cost-effective to get a representative sample of hold-out populations than going door-to-door to a population that doesn’t like to open their doors to government representatives.
This approach would likely be less costly across the board. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has classified the Census as a “high-risk program,” citing escalating expenses and cost overruns. In 2020 (the year of the most recent census), the cost of counting a household had more than doubled from 1990 even after adjusting for inflation. The 2020 Census cost the U.S. government an astounding $14 billion, and the 2030 Census will likely cost even more absent systemic reform.
The USPS, which notoriously paid $10 billion for an electric vehicle truck fleet that never got delivered, is a particularly poor candidate to conduct a cost-effective census. The federal government should ditch the in-person count and instead rely on data it already has at its disposal. This is a far better alternative to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
READ MORE from Ross Marchand:
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Ross Marchand is a senior fellow for the Taxpayers Protection Alliance.
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