The director of the U.S. Census Bureau is resigning, the Commerce Department announced Tuesday, leaving the government’s lead statistical agency without a clear leader as the bureau ramps up for the massive decennial task of counting the entire U.S. population in 2020.
Census Bureau Director John Thompson’s announcement that he is leaving at the end of June comes less than a week after he testified on Capitol Hill, telling House appropriators that his agency would be able to carry out the Census effectively, despite a number of cost overruns and a lower budget than normal for this point in the 10-year planning cycle.
Normally as Census planning shifts from the seventh year of the decade to the eighth, the budget jumps dramatically. But Congress did not pass the Obama administration’s budget for 2017, leaving the bureau about $160 million short of its $1.61 billion request.
