Sean Patrick Maloney: “no matter what we do, we must fund the decennial census, and we have to stop putting the census in jeopardy. The Census…”

“no matter what we do, we must fund the decennial census, and we have to stop putting the census in jeopardy. The Census Bureau needs full funding by October 1. The administration has requested $4.5 billion in order to count everyone in America. The bill before us contains all but about $11 million of that request, and I commend the gentleman from Kentucky (Mr. Rogers) and the gentleman from New York (Mr. Serrano) and the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Miller), the chairman of the Subcommittee on the Census of the Committee on Government Reform for providing that money. Almost as important, this bill contains none of the onerous language prohibiting the use of modern scientific methods which has been in previous Commerce-Justice-State funding bills that have held up two budgets and led to one presidential veto of a disaster relief bill because of the antisampling language attached to it. The Census Bureau plans to use such methods to conduct a quality check on the raw census field counts. These more accurate numbers can and will be used for nonapportionment purposes like redistricting and the distribution of hundreds of millions of dollars in Federal funds. Mr. Chairman, we have been debating the census for an entire decade. No one should be surprised. But Congress failed to allow for the census in the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, and now, we find ourselves in the embarrassing situation of declaring the census unanticipated. This is not an emergency.”