Live from Music Row Thursday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. –  host Leahy welcomed United States Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross to the program.
At the end of the third hour, Ross explained why completing the 2020 Census was important for communities. He added that the census is completely confidential and that it can never be accessed by anyone at any time and encouraged people to complete it.
Leahy: We are joined on the newsmaker line by United States Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross. Welcome, Secretary Ross.
Ross: Thank you for having me on this morning, Michael.
Leahy: We are delighted to have you on. You want to talk about the census and what’s happening and what people can do to help the census work.
Ross: Yes. The census is very very important in that it’s taken only once every ten years. In the 2020 Census will dictate for the next 10 years the allocation of hundreds of billions of dollars of federal funding per year. And it will also help dictate the allocation of congressional seats.
So it’s very important to Tennessee and its communities not to be short-changed. And the reason that that’s particularly important is nationwide we’re doing pretty well. Over 100 million households have responded. That’s 63.4 percent of the households in the country. Tennessee is a bit behind at 62.7 percent. Seven-tenths of a percent may not sound like a lot but it could very well be the difference between the congressional seat and a not congressional seat.
So it really is a very important thing. The census data is kept totally confidential. It’s encrypted from the moment we receive it while it’s in transit and when it’s at rest. Every census worker takes a lifetime oath not to reveal any data. And if anyone did it’s punishable by several years in federal prison and a huge fine. So the data are safe and will not be turned over to ICE. They will not be turned over to local law enforcement. Will not be turned over to the FBI. They will not be turned over to anyone.
Leahy: Secretary Ross I have some good news for you. Your census workers in Tennessee are doing their job. I was at home yesterday. I live in Williamson County here in Tennessee. In the afternoon I do some writing at the house and I was on a phone call. And I saw this person drive up in a very nice census bureau van into my driveway. They were wearing a mask. They were identified as census bureau.
They walked up and knocked on the door. And I was on the phone doing some business and I said, hey, I can’t talk right now. And they said that’s fine. How many people live in the household? I told them and they gave me a piece of paper. They left and they were very professional. Now I have two days to fill out the information. And guess what Secretary Ross? I’m going to go online and fill it out.
Ross: That’s great. You are a great American for doing that. And I hope all of your listeners will follow your very good example even if they are on the phone when the census bureau worker comes around.
Leahy: Every Thursday on this program Secretary Ross, former Vanderbilt professor Carol Swain is our co-host. And she has a question for you.
Swain: What are you going to do in those intercity areas where people may not respond to census workers? Are they going to try and do some kind of estimates of the population rather than the actual count?
Ross: Our goal is to enumerate every single person. What we have done is we’ve recruited all sorts of local groups to help us to publicize to their constituents the safety and the confidentiality of putting in their responses. Local health organizations and various ethnic organizations and every local group that we can find we ask to help. We also have the census forms available in a very large number of languages. Obviously English. Obviously Spanish.
Obviously Portuguese. Also Chinese and Japanese. And many other languages. So we are doing our best to make it easy. It takes less than 10 minutes to fill out the form. There will be a few that don’t respond. In those cases, we will get what information we can from their immediate neighbor. The neighbor may very well know if two people occupy that household. Or three or four or what have you.
So we try to get it from a neighbor if we can. At the end of the day, there will be a very small number hopefully of households where we don’t have the neighbor a proxy. We don’t have direct data. There we will try to rely best we can on administrative records. There are much more available than ever before for the census. So we’ve got a whole bunch of fallbacks to help get people to respond.
Leahy: One last question for Secretary Ross from Carol Swain.
Swain: Sir is their a check? Because millions of dollars rely on the population. We know sometimes there is an incentive to misrepresent. Is there a way to verify that there’s nothing fraudulent that takes place?
Ross: We’ve tried that. And that’s again where we use the administrative records. We have the IRS records. We have state department records. We have social security records. In some places, we have the state WICK and SNAP records.
In a few states, we even have driver’s license records. So we have all sorts of ways to try to double-check responses. And in some cases especially when something looks a little out of whack we will go back in and try to re-verify the original data because the two big goals we have are completeness and accuracy.
Leahy: Secretary Wilbur Ross last question very quickly. I’ma genealogy buff. When will the 1950 census records be available online? Is that coming soon or do I have to wait a little longer?
Ross: 72 years later.
Leahy: I can wait! I can wait!
Listen to the full third hour here:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.Â
