The Census Bureau

The census is one of the few government functions the Constitution requires by name. Article I orders an actual enumeration of the population every ten years to apportion House seats among the states, and the first count, in 1790, found 3.9 million people. For more than a century each census was run by a temporary office assembled and disbanded every decade. Congress made it permanent on March 6, 1902, and the bureau moved to the new Commerce Department the following year. Herman Hollerith's punch-card tabulators, built to speed the 1890 count, became the foundation of IBM.

The decennial census remains the bureau's defining task and the largest peacetime mobilization the federal government undertakes. The 2020 count hired about half a million temporary workers, cost more than fourteen billion dollars, and for the first time let most households respond online. Its results reapportion the House, redraw every legislative district in the country, and steer the distribution of roughly 2.8 trillion dollars a year in federal funds tied to population. Between counts the bureau runs the American Community Survey, which asks a sample of households each year the detailed questions the short decennial form no longer carries.

The bureau is also the country's chief economic statistician. It conducts the Economic Census every five years, publishes monthly data on retail sales, housing starts, trade, and manufacturing, and runs the Current Population Survey from which the Bureau of Labor Statistics derives the unemployment rate. Its roughly 4,000 permanent employees work mostly at headquarters in Suitland, Maryland, and at regional offices. By law, individual census responses are confidential for seventy-two years and cannot be used against anyone, a protection the bureau has guarded since it was breached during World War II to locate Japanese Americans.

Every census is contested because every census allocates power. Fights over whether to count undocumented immigrants in apportionment, whether to add a citizenship question, how to protect privacy without distorting small-area data, and how to reach the groups the count misses reached the Supreme Court before the 2020 census and continue toward 2030. The bureau's Director serves a five-year term under a 2012 law meant to shield the office from politics, though the post has been filled by acting officials for long stretches.