Obama Officially Taps Groves to Head the Census
President Barack Obama on Thursday afternoon named University of Michigan professor Robert Groves to be Census Bureau director.
Groves is believed to back statistical sampling of the Census, and his appointment is already beginning to generate a firestorm on Capitol Hill. The next population count is set for 2010.
Groves has a long record of studying surveying methods, publishing numerous book chapters and articles on the topic. He served from 1990 to 1992 as Census associate director for statistical design, standards and methodology. In an interview this afternoon with Roll Call, former Commerce Secretary Robert Mosbacher, who ran the department when Groves was at the Census Bureau, said Groves was among those who backed sampling and pushed for its use in the Census.
Mosbacher said he rejected the effort because he and senior aides determined that sampling did not pass constitutional muster since the advocates could not prove it was any more accurate than performing a traditional count.
Statistical sampling, which adjusts counts to account for low response rates by certain population segments, is ardently opposed by many Republicans.
Republicans on Thursday began expressing misgivings about the appointment.
Of course there are misgivings about a man who professes to be a big advocate of statistical sampling. Sampling is a very biased process and data can be manipulated any which way you would like. Anyone who has taken statistics knows that sampling is fun, if you like numbers, and can also be used to achieve a goal in marketing or business to make it appear as though a certain population approves or disapproves of something, etc. I do not know the specific constitutional provisions that this type of census building would not meet, but I don’t doubt that’s the case because of the manipulation factor in this mathematical method.
