As 2010 Census operations wind down, the Census Bureau has been forced to get rid of many of its temporary employees. However, the few employees who are still employed at the Detroit Regional Census Center’s “partnership” office have one thing in common: They are closely connected to the Detroit political machine and/or the Democratic Party. And the one current employee who doesn’t fit the above description is Twoine Murphy, who was indicted by the State of Michigan for his involvement in a Ponzi scheme.

To give you some background on the word “Partnership” in 2010 Census terms, the Census Bureau created an outreach program for the 2010 Census intended to boost involvement by linguistic, racial, and sexual minorities. The stimulus package gave this program a mega boost when it awarded upwards of $500 million in additional cash to the Census Bureau for outreach efforts, many of which are coordinated by “Partnership Specialists” and “Partnership Coordinators.”

(Some of these partnership employees have been paid upwards of $85,000 per year at the GS-14 and GS-15 levels of pay for federal employees.)

Let’s look at the cast of characters in the Detroit Regional Census Center who were NOT let go from the Census Bureau — even though “partnership” activities are long finished and the vast majority of employees in this office were let go in early June. The survivors are as follows:

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$15 billion. That’s the budget of the 2010 US Census. Where to begin with how it has been misspent? When we look back at the past ten years, we can see how the Census Bureau is an institution in need of major reforms because poor work has been rewarded and PR spinsters have been left running the show to make it seem like everything is hunky-dory.

The 2010 Census is currently in the non-response follow-up (NRFU) stage of operations (to track down individuals who did not mail back their 2010 Census forms on time), which is the largest and most expensive stage of the 2010 Census. 635,000 workers are involved in this operation, and it is the largest peacetime civilian hiring effort in the history of the United States. Yet this operation has been plagued by failure from the get-go. Let’s first take a look at the now infamous handheld computer debacle:

In 2006 the Census Bureau signed a contract with the Florida-based Harris Corporation to design handheld computers (HHCs) that would be used for the 2010 Census. This contract was initially worth $600 million. Yet because of poor directions and incompetence from Census Bureau officials about what they desired and a the failure on on the part of Harris Corp. to determine what specifications the government needed, the designs that were used for this project were flawed from the get-go.

Rather than creating a “fixed price contract,” the government created a “cost-plus contract” that essentially gave the Harris Corp. a blank check to fiddle around as they wished to the tune of $600 million. And, they fiddled and fiddled and fiddled and failed.

So what did the Census Bureau do to correct this problem? They gave the same company an extra $200 million in 2008 and told them to try it again. Ultimately, Harris delivered some handheld computers that were able to be used during the Address Canvassing phase of 2010 Census operations, but employees have repeatedly claimed that these devices were extremely faulty, slow, and at times completely non-functional. (Had the Census Bureau decided to equip its employees with special versions of the Blackberry or I-Phone, such a debacle would have been avoided.)

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FoxNews.com reports:

The Census Director has sent a letter to the National Headquarters of ACORN notifying the group that the Census Bureau is severing all ties with the community organizing group for all work having to do with the 2010 census.

“Over the last several months, through ongoing communication with our regional offices, it is clear that ACORN’s affiliation with the 2010 Census promotion has caused sufficient concern in the general public, has indeed become a distraction from our mission, and may even become a discouragement to public cooperation, negatively impacting 2010 Census efforts,” read a letter from Census Director Robert M. Groves to the president of ACORN.

“Unfortunately, we no longer have confidence that our national partnership agreement is being effectively managed through your many local offices. For the reasons stated, we therefore have decided to terminate the partnership,” the letter said.

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