Tom Carper

We have been going after and trying to recover money from Medicare, a lot of it fraud.

We have a lot of contractors hungry for work and anxious to bid.

Well, I applaud those efforts and urge you to continue them.

The OMB needs to provide additional guidance to help people determine the amount of jobs created and preserved.

What do we need to be doing here in the legislative side, in this hearing?

We are up to about $72 billion worth of improper payments, mostly overpayments.

We need a first-rate Director of the Census Bureau and we need him or her right now.

All right. The Administration's fiscal year 2010 budget doesn't propose increasing recruitment and hiring of Census takers for non-response follow-up as Congress envisioned in approving extra funds for the Census in the stimulus package.

Well, it sounds to me like part of what you all have said, a number of you said, one, make sure that--the key here is to try to reduce the number of people that aren't responding.

I think your response was, well, right now, let us just do what we said we were going to do and do that well.

The Secretary of Commerce wasn't very mindful of those responsibilities, his oversight responsibilities in terms of providing directional leadership for the Bureau of the Census.

I think maybe in each of those instances, certainly in IRS, the Department of Treasury, you have a Commissioner serving a 5-year term and the head of the Department is a political appointee who may not be there for 5 years.

I would like to ask each of you to send me two names by close of business tomorrow of somebody that you think would be an excellent Director of the Bureau of the Census.

We want to make sure that whoever is leading this operation has the resources to do the job as best we can.

That is a very good point.

Given the cost of the Census in an era of unprecedented fiscal challenges, what are the cost drivers of the Census and how can the Bureau produce an accurate yet cost-effective Census?

We really need to look at what other approaches are out there that can either get better results or at least control the costs better.

I just think that, however it is structured, it should have the freedom to make independent programmatic decisions.

I think that is in some legislation that the House is considering.

I think that it is a very good idea to have a term appointment for the Director of the Census Bureau.

I was the founding vice chairman of that as governor at the time and we decided we would do a paid ad campaign.

I want to make sure that when that new Director of the Bureau of the Census is identified, vetted, nominated, confirmed, goes to work, that he or she have a pretty good to-do list.

If you haven't started thinking about who you would like to have on the Census Bureau, start thinking about it right now.

I agree that we need a Director of the Census Bureau as soon as possible.

I think there would need to be some safeguards in place, with the Census, it is important to have impartial data.