Last Friday, The Post filed an appeal to uncover over a thousand e-mails that the Census Bureau and the Commerce Department seem desperate to keep hidden.
This is the second batch of e-mails that Commerce — which oversees Census — is refusing to make available under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA.)
In all, between three pending requests, several thousand e-mails are being kept from public view. On top of that, there are almost a thousand pages of e-mails that were handed over that were like Swiss cheese — that is, had varying degrees of sections blacked out.
The appeal involves e-mails between four supervisors in Census’ Philadelphia region during the months surrounding the last Presidential election.
Census gave The Post about half the thousand-plus e-mails that it already admitted existed and met my search criteria. Then, in an about-face, Census claimed that 595 of those e-mails are “non-responsive.” The redactions in what was turned over, the government claimed, were exempted from disclosure under FOIA.
The exemptions by Commerce are “improperly claimed,” lawyers for The Post wrote in their 23-page appeal.
Tellingly, the e-mails that were turned over included a discussion between the supervisors about 120 computers that had been misplaced just weeks before the election.
Sixty-one of those computers — including 11 that were used by supervisors — were still missing just two weeks before the Labor Department reported a big drop in the unemployment rate leading up to the election.
Census conducts the jobless surveys for Labor. The computers that were misplaced would have contained information for that survey and the supervisors’ computers could have been used to change responses.
The Post already has an appeal in for e-mails between the supervisor of the Census Philly region and his counterpart in Chicago. The guy in Chicago, Stanley Moore, is supposed to have been the mentor of Fernando Armstrong, the head of the Philly region.
We’d like to know what the two were discussing on their government computers. If they’re talking about non-government related matters, query whether that was proper at all.
If they were talking politics — that’s a whole different issue.
There are important differences between the Census e-mails and what’s going on over at the IRS.
In the case of Census, we already know how many e-mails exist because Census was nice enough to tell us.
Computer hard drives can’t go missing — it would be much too blatant at this point.
Don’t get me wrong, the probe of the IRS and the possible focus of audits on conservative-leaning non-profits is important. But some people might dismiss the alleged targeting of conservative groups for tax problems as nothing more than politics as usual. I disagree, but that’s what others might say.
The need for pure government statistics is unquestioned and that’s what my investigation involves. The numbers put out by agencies like Commerce and Census — and whether they are fudged for political purposes — affect everything from helping corporate executives determine how much money to spend on capital improvements to how big a raise your Aunt Sophie will get in her next Social Security payment.
The light The Post is shining on the problems in the Philly region’s data collection has already led to several reforms in the way the statistics are gathered. And more are likely to come after Congressional investigators finish their probe.
Even Commerce seems to have taken notice. Last month, Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker announced the hiring of the department’s “first-ever Chief Data Officer,” who would be in charge of the “expansion and enhancement of Commerce data programs.”
This CDO would also “instigate and oversee improvements in data collection and dissemination…” That last responsibility is buried in an explanation Commerce gave in a footnote to a blog posting by Pritzker.
Commerce wouldn’t answer when I asked if that means one of the tasks of this new CDO would be to make sure people at Census stop screwing around with the data.