“We are optimistic that things at the Census Bureau will be better. The Biden administration also has pledged to give the Census Bureau the time it needs to process the data. He will report to Biden's new pick to head the Commerce Department — which oversees the Census Bureau — Rhode Island Gov. Former Census Bureau Director Kenneth Prewitt said he’s optimistic the final product will be as accurate as past censuses, especially now that Jarmin is at the helm. “The Census Bureau faced a number of challenges with the 2020 Census,” Schatz said in a letter.

“The Census Bureau takes falsification allegations very seriously,” the bureau said. But census workers are rarely prosecuted for falsification of census responses since the Census Bureau is more concerned with identifying fraud and correcting mistakes than pursuing legal penalties, according to experts. At the height of the door-knocking phase of the census in mid-August, there were more than 285,000 temporary census takers on the Census Bureau's payroll. “It’s been a challenging road as we battled COVID-19, hurricanes, wildfires, and more," Census Bureau director Steven Dillingham said Tuesday in a blog post. If the Census Bureau is going to fix any problems because of data-collection problems, the first step is determining the quality of the 2020 census, said John Thompson, a former Census Bureau director in the Obama administration.

After the Supreme Court's decision, the Census Bureau said field operations would end on Thursday. At issue was a request by the Trump administration that the Supreme Court suspend a lower court's order extending the 2020 census through the end of October following delays caused by the pandemic. “A census count delayed is justice denied," Liccardo said. The Census Bureau says it has counted 99.9% of households nationwide, though some regions of the country such as parts of Mississippi and hurricane-battered Louisiana fall well below that. “That said, the Supreme Court’s order will result in irreversible damage to the 2020 Census," Clarke said.

Census Bureau Director Steven Dillingham wears a mask with the words "2020 Census" as he arrives to testify before a House Committee on Oversight and Reform hearing on the 2020 Census on Capitol Hill, Wednesday, July 29, 2020, in Washington. Dillingham testified during an emergency congressional hearing that he was unaware of anyone from the Census Bureau playing a role in the order that civil rights groups have called unconstitutional. The bureau is collecting the head count data that will be used to redraw the districts. Concerns about the virus's spread caused the Census Bureau to suspend field operations in March and April and push back deadlines. Trump's order last week showed what the administration's true purpose was in trying to obtain citizenship information, said Gomez, the Democratic lawmaker.

The Census Bureau is in the middle of the 2020 census, and some of the bureaus 500,000 door-knockers started heading out this month to households that havent yet answered the questionnaire. The Census Bureau also postponed finishing field operations for the 2020 census from the end of July to the end of October. Senate Republicans on Monday instead proposed an additional $448 million in funding for the 2020 census in its coronavirus-relief bill. This funding would allow for additional hiring, staffing resources, and replenished contingency funding to provide schedule flexibility as the Census Bureau conducts its largest field operation, nonresponse followup," the Census Bureau said Monday on its website. Kenneth Prewitt, who served as a Census Bureau director in the Clinton administration, said an accelerated census in the middle of a pandemic can only be explained politically."