Dems urge Bush to appoint career official to head Census Bureau

Everett Ehrlich, a Democratic member of the Census Monitoring Board, said Tuesday that President Bush could take politics out of the census by nominating acting Census Bureau Director William Barron, a career government employee, to the position permanently.

Democrats on the oversight board released the latest in a series of reports arguing that a repeat of the 1990 census undercount will likely cost urban and minority groups political power and government funding. The release came in the wake of President Bush's decision late last week to give Commerce Secretary Don Evans authority to decide whether sampled census data may be used for redistricting.

Although Evans is widely expected in the coming weeks to endorse more traditional numbers instead of sampling data, Ehrlich warned Bush and Evans against dismissing sampling.

"The issue is about how far the Bush administration will go to advance partisan, political objectives," Ehrlich said. "We must not have a stolen census."

Democrats contend sampling is the only way to count minority and urban groups undercounted in the 2000 census, but Republicans say they fear using the data for redistricting because of the potential for political manipulation.

Whatever the decision, litigation over the numbers appears inevitable, with at least two sources today suggesting the City of Los Angeles could file a lawsuit by the end of the week in favor of sampling.

During a forum Tuesday, the monitoring board released two reports showing that using sampling to adjust 1990 census undercounts could have increased access to medical care for minorities.

Llewellyn Cornelius, a University of Maryland professor, said his research of 1996 data showed the 1990 undercount led health policy planners to miss 400,000 uninsured Americans--nearly half black or Hispanic--at an unanticipated cost of $960 million in 1996.

Georgetown University Professor Darrell Gaskin separately released a study concluding that because the 1990 undercount missed many minority Americans, unadjusted data inflated disease incidence rates and other healthcare indicators per capita, while also exaggerating the availability of access to health care.