The House in passing a fiscal 2010 appropriations bill for the Commerce and Justice departments raised concerns about the management, particularly the personnel management, in several programs and sub-agencies of each.
The Census Bureau was urged to hire a diverse pool of employees, particularly for partnership specialist and enumerator positions for the 2010 census. "These indigenous workers bring language skills and neighborhood and cultural knowledge to bear on the task, and are thus more likely to be accepted by communities during outreach and non-response follow-up, resulting in a more accurate count. The Census Bureau is also encouraged to strive to maintain a more diverse, full-time workforce, including at the senior management level," an Appropriations Committee report says.
The report also expressed concern that the Census Bureau "has not adequately planned for assistance in languages other than Spanish for the 2010 Census and the ACS, which may result in an inaccurate count of limited English proficient and immigrant communities. The Census Bureau should provide the Committee with updates on a semi-annual basis on its language assistance program, including information on how it will reach and assist respondents who speak Asian, American Indian and Alaska Native languages, Spanish, and other languages spoken by ethnic immigrants in the United States for the ACS and the 2010 Census."
The report also noted a recent study determined that the Census ad campaign is "obsolete." The bill directs Census to "work closely with the communications provider to ensure that the decennial’s outreach activities are targeted to ensure high rates of survey responses in all communities, particularly within hard-to-reach communities." It also ordered the bureau to "allocate sufficient funding to support robust paid media efforts in preparation for the 2010 Decennial Census, with specific focus on hard-to-reach populations, and to ensure that these efforts surpass the effectiveness of such efforts in 2000."
