JOHN CRUDELE: “Good riddance to John Thompson, the head of the Census Bureau.”

JOHN CRUDELE: “Good riddance to John Thompson, the head of the Census Bureau.” [archive]

My crusade against Thompson’s organization began in 2013 with a tip from a census worker named Stefani Butler, [archive] who told me about an enumerator in the Washington, DC, area who was filling out surveys without ever interviewing people. After investigating, I learned from other census people around the country that this was a common practice. . . .

Then I moved on to large contracts that were given out by the bureau without the benefit of having companies submit bids. That also came from a tipster inside the Census Bureau. Again, the bureau under Thompson didn’t seem to do a thing about this skirting of the rules that say government contracts needed to be competitively bid unless there was a very good reason. All along Thompson’s Bureau never protected the whistleblowers, as the law mandates. Instead people like Butler were retaliated against, pushed out of their jobs and simply given no work to do. . . .

Lastly, I wrote numerous times about how Thompson was criticized by his own inspector general — the Census Bureau’s cop, if you will — for not getting a good grip on how much the 2020 Census was going to cost. Thompson had unpacked all kinds of ways he was going to reduce the cost of the 2020 Census from the $12.5 billion price tag a decade earlier. But the IG — as I reported in several columns — didn’t believe him and raised alarms about his plans.

Those concerns were apparently behind Thompson’s sudden “retirement” last week.

The bureau’s decision in 1980 to divide the country into what has come to be known as the ethnolinguistic pentagon of white, black, Hispanic, Asian, and Indian-American redefined the nation. This year the bureau is considering two changes [archive] that would take us further down the road of becoming a nation of groups.

(Evidently, “a nation of groups” is made by mere classification, rather than by immigration policy.)

The first creates a new ethnic interest group out of Americans who originate in that great swath of land between Morocco and the Iranian–Afghan border. This new group, Middle East and North Africa (or Mena), would then be subject to redistricting and other items in the cornucopia of the affirmative-action regime. These are the same Americans who, for over a century, have been considered — and considered themselves to be — white, not an “othered” minority.

The second change is a new classification for Hispanics that would make it harder for Americans who originate in Latin America or Iberia to identify themselves as black, white, or some other race.