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A4 U.S. NEWS
Wednesday 23 OctOber 2019

After verifying addresses, Census Bureau is hiring thousands

By MIKE SCHNEIDER to recruit and hire as many Timothy Olson, the agen- ended more than a week Phoenix. “Until it works, you
Associated Press as 500,000 temporary work- cy’s associate director for ago. Olson called the ad- don’t feel good, and I was
ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — After ers to help with the largest field operations, said 32,000 dress verification process a so relieved.”
verifying millions of address- head count in U.S. history workers verified 50 million success. The agency already has
es, the U.S. Census Bureau next spring, an agency of- addresses over an almost “It worked,” Olson said applications from 900,000
is kicking off a campaign ficial said Tuesday. two-month period that at a news conference in people for 2020 Census
jobs, but the bureau wants
a potential pool of 2.7 mil-
lion applicants to choose
from. Most of the hiring will
be done in the first quarter
of next year.
The 2020 Census head
count will be the first de-
cennial census in which
respondents are encour-
aged to answer questions
online, though they will
also be able to answer
questions by telephone
and with mail-in paper
questionnaires.
Most of the workers will be
used for visits to households
that don’t respond. The
pay for the part-time work
will range from $13.50 to
$30 an hour.
Census officials have ac-
knowledged the challeng-
es of hiring in a tight labor
market and are launching
paid advertisement this
week to recruit applicants.
The 2020 Census will help
determine how many con-
gressional seats each state
gets, as well as the alloca-
tion of hundreds of billions
of dollars in federal spend-
ing.
Separately, seven former
Census Bureau directors
on Tuesday wrote an open
letter to congressional
leaders, urging them to
fully fund Census Bureau
operations as soon as pos-
sible. Without that fund-
ing, they said the bureau’s
2020 Census efforts could
be hampered.
The letter noted that Presi-
dent Donald Trump’s 2020
request for $5.3 billion in
new funding for the cen-
sus was below the House
of Representatives’ $7.5
billion request and the Sen-
ate Appropriations Com-
mittee’s $6.7 billion.q