Other numbers of note:

Original contract price with Harris, 2yrs ago: $600M for 500,000 devices.
Current cost: $1.3B for 151,000 devices.
Current projected costs: $2B for 151,000 devices.

Total original estimated census cost: $11B
Total current estimated census cost: $14B

Treehuggers and Vegitarians/Vegans = Downfall of Humanity, Pure Evil.

Just give them all Blackberries or iPhones or some shii and call it a day.

They already know how to use those!

I think the people in the Census Bureau are only allowed to come out of their caves every 10 years. That's the only explanation I have for them trying to get all this "new" technology. Someone should tell them all this already exists.

So sad that they insist on making this even more complicated... If you think about it proving a simple touch based phone and using all open source software you would be able to do this. Or even just using something like zoho's database creator...

Anyway there goes more of our tax money.

I live in Melbourne, FL, home of Harris. I met a woman, a programmer there, about 6 weeks ago. She said they had a big deadline to meet and a lot of reprogramming work to do on their hardware they were rolling out to the Census Bureau. She had a real look of concern in her eye. I can see why, now.

Too bad regular people can't bid on these and get all the cost increases. They should do these computer/software contract as a competition with some high school or college students that don't have a profit motive as goal one. They could have a $1 million dollar top prize plus large prizes for everyone else and still save money.

Won't somebody please think of the trees!!

@Papsky: Don't worry.

They're looking for tree fellers and there's only two of us!

I worked at the Census Bureau as a survey statistician for around 3 years.

@digodemais: Smug much? The Census Bureau conducts regular survey operations every day of the year. They collect minor information like the inputs to the Consumer Price Index (CPI). There's an entire trade division that collects the information that feeds stats about the U.S. import/export trades. There's a group that collects info about unreported crimes that balance out and give a better picture of crime in the country. Those are just a very small piece of the huge number of current surveys that are conducted. Sounds like you should come out of your cave and find out what they're doing the other 9 years.

"All this" doesn't exist. What they're doing is called "Non-Response Followup". That's for all the dickweeds that don't respond to the mailing. Previously, that was (and looks like will be) done on paper and then manually data entered, or possibly optically scanned in the Jeffersonville, IN facility. It's time consuming and expensive.

They're leveraging the non-response followup to work on the Master Address File (MAF). How do you think the USPS gets a list of all the addreses in the entire US? For that matter, how does Google get it? The Census sells it to them. So in this case, the tech couldn't exist without the updates done by the Census. Google doesn't just magically Will a database into existence- the point of origin is the Census. Here, they're just adding a GPS point to the data.

The Census needs it to update their statistical sampling models. They have to get every address so that they have a full universe from which to sample. They added GPS to add another data points. I was in the original Field Division meetings that discussed it back around 2000-01. The logic was that if we have people there, we might as well pop a GPS coordinate on it. We could then take that data and map efficient routes for field interviewing, etc.

If I know the poeple that spec'd out the devices (and I do) they wanted a design that could do way too much than they were asking. They were petrified about letting laptops in the field that had windows installed on them for CAPI. They spec'd a dumb device that couldn't be sold, or repurposed by the throngs of idiots that they have to hire to get the job done. When the device is worth more than their total paycheck, they'd have no incentive to bring it back.

@Elvisisdead: I am astonished that you want to bring facts and context into this discussion.

I know some folks that did the on-the-ground followup work for the 2000 census, and while it was a lot of paper and such, they seemed to me to have it pretty well under control.

There was long forms for some people, short forms for the rest, it was pretty straightforward that you had this chunk of the map and which addresses you needed to talk to, and turned in the forms at the end of every shift for their magical tabulation.

I'm a huge geek, gadget fiend, and all that, but honestly, there are times when the best way to do something is with a pen and paper. Its just a shame that it took the census bureau sinking $2b into a failed project to figure this out.

@strider_mt2k: Yea, i dont consider myself much of a treehugger/hippie but i think the census people could have figured out an easy way to do this.
But then again, since i started workin in an office at college i am amazed at how much paper is wasted when email and Word documents are available and can be substituted. I would have thought people would have embraced the whole "Paperless office" concept a little better.
I kinda wanna check out those handheld devices the census people would have used. Take it for a spin and see whats the problem personally.

@belltolls: I'm just glad to know that when I opt not to do business with companies that will sell my information, the IRS will just do it for them.

Hey Harris Corp., U.S. taxpayers called, they want their money back!

@Elvisisdead: So you're telling me that a way to input information into a portable device and transfer it to a main device doesn't exist?

@belltolls: wow. you managed to insult everyone from the census bureau and the survey takers to the ordinary citizen in one relatively short (for a crazy rant) comment, peppering it with useful information along the way. Impressive.

This is absolutely ridiculous. Such a waste, really. Roughly $150 million would have purchased enough Palms to arm every census taker with one, and one good Palm programmer could have cooked up the software in a week. Instead they wanted to spend 10 times as much using custom instead of off-the-shelf hardware. Dumb.

@digodemais: Currently, they do manual map reviews where SFRs (Senior Field Reps) have physical maps sent to them each month and they drive the roads and update the map segments. These all fall into a regular update cycle. They actually draw maps of the houses and list the addresses that a geographer back at HQ plots map points on in a GIS system. This new system will automate that process.

Essentially, they don't trust numnut low level folks to update the maps - and that was a huge sticking point when developing a system to electronically map addresses. During the initial talks, QA and the ability to modify the work of others was a big issue.

As of right now, there are a select few who do the mapping. I'd say it's probably less than 200 people do all of it in the entire US, including AK PR and HI, and they're trusted. If they're issuing these to all Census workers, I'd LOVE to know how they are going to ensure quality.

@weatherman: Then do it and sell it to them. I can almost guarantee that you can't. A Palm is a consumer-grade piece of junk. It can't hold up to the misuse and abuse from low tech census temps. You'd spend half that replacing dead hardware, etc. Never mind the custom development that it would take to tie in to the Census infrastructure and existing data systems.

You'd need something on par with the UPS/FedEx machines, but with full touch screens to do mapping and GPS capabilities. At $100/each, that's 1.5 mil for hardware ALONE. Figure 4-5 x that just for the handheld hardware. 10 mil right there. Data services for the devices? Infrastructure upgrades? Development costs? Helpdesk? Hardware repair/service? All for a fleet of 150K units being used at the same time, almost 24 hours a day for almost a year? $150 mil sounds about right.

Working by myself (or any other talented software engineer), I could put together a database backed secure website that could be accessed from any web connected phone that would be able to receive all the data in about a week. This is such a waste of time and money and really shows how crooked our government contract system is. How hard could this be that they still can't get it working with more than a year and half left? Truly amazing. I should change businesses so I can reap windfalls at the taxpayers expense, too. These guys should not be paid.

Pretty sure that the Census is supposed to only be a count of citizens so that they can allocate congressional seats (see US constitution).

I refuse to answer any "long form" questions that I do not feel are necessary to the functions of government.

@robo: Just be sure to ask that question about for what what the answers are used instead of arbitrarily refusing based on nothing other than stubbornness.

Only Census Bureau employees see PII (Personally Identifiable Information). Any statistics that are released will not be done in any form that can identify an individual. The Census Bureau has NEVER had a breach of this information. Not even during WW2 when congress tried to make them release the names of all Japanese surnames in the Census. It has never happened.

By refusing to answer the questions, you are crippling the government that you loathe. So many parts of the government use this data to aid in decision making. Take a look for yourself about how it is used. [factfinder.census.gov]

Maybe the Feds ought to ask UPS how to make it work.

I participated in the census test fairly recently. My job was to verify the address/location of residences using a gps-equipped Dell PDA. While it wasn't the most sophisticated setup in the world, it was more than adequate for those purposes.

Any failure of the program really has more to do with the quality of the people being hired to perform the task. Very few if any of my fellow testers had ever used a PDA before. The census bureau essentially expected mostly undereducated tech-illiterate people to manipulate a mini-database, identify the location of homes using computer mapping software, and then upload this information from the PDA to the bureau's computers using a modem.

And if anyone's wondering, we really did get issued those messenger bags.

@FrankReality: Or, maybe they contract UPS to get GPS coordinates for most of it and then just cover the minimal amount that's left. Or frankly, the USPS. They're at every address every day anyway - and they need the extra cash.

I thought insight into how the Census Bureau worked would be interesting, then it became defending a bloated, spend-happy, technologically gimped bureau.

Do I read right, that $150 million would get all the units outfitted with UPS/FedEx type tracking? Wasn't the cost of the handheld program $1.3 Billion?

The USPS needs the tracking system anyway, install it on their vehicles, maybe that would cost $1.5 Bil. But, you have killed two birds.

Can't trust the USPS to plot a point on a GPS, but we trust them with a $5000 Plasma? The USPS workers have alot to lose if they don't perform. Plenty of people in line for a good governemnt job.

What happens if all the pencils were stolen? They could be reverse-engineered and all the private data would be compromised!

@Elvisisdead: Absolutely right, sir! No one could pull off a system of the required complexity for less than $1 billion!