Department of Commerce

The historic mission of the Department of Commerce is "to foster, promote, and develop the foreign and domestic commerce" of the United States. GAO has identified two key challenges facing the department that we believe merit the attention of America’s senior leadership.

• First, the department’s ability to support future weather-forecasting services has been jeopardized by problems with a major satellite acquisition. In particular, the department’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has not ensured the efficient and effective acquisition of a crucial $15 billion weather satellite system, called the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System, which has experienced cost overruns, schedule delays, and technical challenges. Due to these challenges, a Presidential task force recently decided to disband this satellite system, and NOAA is pursuing other options. Meanwhile, the department has awarded key contracts to acquire another $7.7 billion environmental satellite system, known as the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-R Series.

• Second, the department’s Census Bureau faces a difficult task in securing a cost-effective headcount in 2020. Although the next enumeration is still several years away, the Census Bureau’s past experience has shown that early investments in research and planning can help reduce the costs and risks of operations that occur later in decade. The basic approach to enumerating the country is much the same as it was in 1970; however, because of various social and demographic trends, achieving acceptable results has required an increasingly larger investment of fiscal resources, resources that will be increasingly scarce in the years ahead. Indeed, the cost of the 2010 Census, at around $13 billion, was the most expensive in our nation’s history. A complete count is critical because the census is a constitutionally mandated program used to apportion and redistrict the U.S. House of Representatives, allocate about $400 billion yearly in federal financial assistance, and inform the planning and investment decisions of numerous public- and private-sector entities. In March 2008, GAO placed the 2010 Census on its High-Risk list due to, among other reasons, weaknesses with the Census Bureau’s management of information technology systems. Although we removed the high-risk designation in February, 2011, after the Census Bureau completed the enumeration, fundamental reforms will be needed for 2020 in order to address long-standing issues.

Ensuring a Cost-Effective 2020 Census

The Census Bureau (Bureau) goes to great lengths each decade to secure a complete count of the nation’s population. Despite these efforts, GAO’s oversight of the 1990, 2000, and 2010 Censuses suggests that the fundamental design of the enumeration—in many ways unchanged since 1970—is no longer capable of delivering a cost-effective headcount given ongoing and newly emerging sociodemographic trends. The reforms needed to address these trends must be thoroughly vetted, tested, and refined; consequently, research and planning needs to start early in the decade to help ensure the next headcount is as cost-effective as possible.

The cost of enumerating each housing unit has escalated from an average of around $16 in 1970, to around $98 in 2010, an increase of over 500 percent (in constant 2010 dollars). At the same time, the mail response rate—a key indicator of a successful census—has declined from 78 percent in 1970 to 63 percent in 2010. In short, the Bureau has to invest substantially more resources each decade in an effort to keep pace with key results from prior enumerations.

Moving forward, the Bureau must control costs while maintaining accuracy in the face of, among other challenges:

• growing public concerns over personal privacy,
• an increasingly diverse population, including more non-English speakers, and
• a larger number of people residing in makeshift and other non-traditional living arrangements.

The Bureau also must reexamine its management of the census, including how it plans and tests census-taking operations.

What Needs to Be Done

GAO’s work throughout the decade has highlighted the key steps that Commerce and the Bureau need to take to better address such long standing issues as securing participation and escalating costs; and in so doing help ensure a cost-effective headcount in 2020. Those steps include:

• Identifying lessons learned from the 2010 Census to improve existing census-taking activities.
• Reexamining and perhaps fundamentally transforming the way the Bureau plans, tests, implements, monitors, and evaluates future enumerations, focusing on such areas as new data collection methods and better leveraging innovations in technology.
• Ensuring that the Bureau’s management, culture, business practices, and automated systems are all aligned with a cost-effective enumeration.
• Developing a comprehensive operational plan that includes performance goals, milestones, cost estimates, and other critical information that could be reviewed by stakeholders and updated regularly.

Ongoing congressional oversight over the course of the decade will also be critical for ensuring the Bureau’s reform efforts stay on track. Such oversight was key to the operational success of the 2010 Census, as the 12 hearings Congress held after we designated the enumeration a high-risk area in March, 2008, helped improve the planning and implementation of the data collection efforts and held the Bureau accountable for results.