It’s a miracle!
Just two days after I asked readers to contact the Commerce Department about a bunch of e-mails that were promised to me months ago — but never delivered — I got a surprise. About a thousand pages of e-mails from the Census Bureau arrived electronically.
And one series of e-mails, written right before the last presidential election, piqued my curiosity. You’ll hear about that in a minute.
Nearly 600 pages of e-mails that the Commerce Department deemed were “not responsive” to my request were withheld. I’ll also get back to that in a bit.
(By the way, The Post paid for copying services for 1,600 pages even though nothing was actually photocopied.)
It probably doesn’t surprise anyone that the vast majority of the delivered e-mails were crap — about missing cellphones, internal procedural matters at Census, business trip plans, etc. And, also not surprisingly, a lot of material in those e-mails was redacted with big black ink splotches put over the words and names.
But there is that one election-time e-mail communication that I want to tell you about. It’s mainly between Fernando Armstrong, head of the Philadelphia Census region, and someone named Somonica L. Green, whose title then was assistant regional director of Census’s Charlotte region.
Charlotte merged with the Philly region shortly before those e-mails were written.
If you’ve been following this story, you know that one person in the Philadelphia region was found to have been fabricating data pulled together for the Labor Department.
That person, Julius Buckmon, was eased out of the Census in 2011, but nobody ever bothered to make any kind of disclosure about the transgression publicly to the Labor Department or to congressional overseers.
Once I broke that story, sources told me that this sort of nonsense went on all the time and wasn’t just confined to Philly. It’s still unclear whether the cheating was politically motivated or merely attempts by the various regions to meet quotas set by Labor and other clients.
But — this is the most pertinent point for this column — one source did tell me nearly a year ago that there was particular trepidation in Philly about Labor Department stats right before President Obama’s re-election bid.
That’s why I requested the e-mails of a half-dozen Census workers under the US Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The pile of 1,000 pages I received last week represented the e-mails of four of those workers — or, more precisely, the e-mails of the four that the Commerce Department didn’t mind me seeing.
The Armstrong-Green e-mail was in that pile.
In an e-mail dated Sept. 13, 2012, Green informed Armstrong that she “may” need help closing out that month’s Consumer Expenditure Survey (which contributes to Labor’s Consumer Price Index) and the Current Population Survey (CPS). The Labor Department creates the monthly unemployment rate entirely from the CPS.
Buckmon cheated on both of those surveys. And a number of sources have told me that both of those surveys are ripe for manipulation once the stats leave the hands of field representatives like Buckmon and become the property of supervisors, who conduct follow-up interviews.
Green specifically asked for help with “follow-up” interviews, part of the quality-control process.
On Sept. 13, the Census Bureau would have been putting together the politically sensitive unemployment report that was released the first Friday of October. That report — the last one before the November election — showed a big drop in the jobless rate that shocked many observers.
To be fair, Green seems to have asked in e-mails for help once before. And the Charlotte Census region where she worked was being phased out, so the area could have been shorthanded.
Green’s job was eliminated in that restructuring, and she now lives in South Carolina. I reached her by phone this week. At first Green said she didn’t recall asking Armstrong for help that September. After I read her the e-mail, she remembered and said assistance was needed because of the cutbacks.
Maybe I’m just too skeptical, but the Green e-mail bothers me on a couple of levels. Why, for instance, did the Census censor black out the names of two or maybe three other people who received that Sept. 13 e-mail from Green? But the names of a pair of other recipients who weren’t the target of my e-mail request were left in.
And why was Green, herself, asking for help? I’m told by a source there were four other levels in the chain of command under Green that should have been handling minutiae like this.
And why was Armstrong being bothered? He was in charge of the whole Philadelphia region. I think this would be like Gov. Chris Christie calling Gov. Andrew Cuomo because someone wants a stop sign on Clove Road in Staten Island.
And why wasn’t Green e-mailing the person in Philly who was on her own level — Armstrong’s assistant? (The assistant was cc’d on the matter but the e-mail was directed at Armstrong.)
Armstrong yesterday referred my call to the Census spokespeople, who, in turn, referred me to the FOIA folks.
The fact that Green was a transfer from Census headquarters in Maryland also makes me quite quizzical.
I hope nothing was going on. But questions still need to be answered.