Although some doubts have been raised about their effectiveness, the U.S. Census Bureau is trying to find out whether U.S. mail carriers will be used as census takers this spring during Head count test for 2030 in two Southern cities — a practice already facing criticism due to last-minute changes made by the Trump administration.
Starting in June, dozens of mail carriers in Spartanburg, South Carolina, and Huntsville, Alabama, will ask in-person questions about race, ethnicity and relationships among residents in households that did not respond to the online test census survey. Invitations to take the test online are going out to 154,600 residents in both cities starting May 1, according to new details released by the Census Bureau on Monday.
The practical training aims to try out new methods For a census that takes place once a decadeWhich determines political power and the distribution of federal funds.
“They usually think it’s great that they’re just a guinea pig,” said Brian Renfro, president of the National Association of Letter Carriers.
In Spartanburg, 25 postal workers participating in the pilot program will knock on doors and ask census test questions to households along their routes. They will identify themselves as postal workers and will be paid their regular US Postal Service wages. The average hourly wage for a mailman was $28.79 in 2024, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Non-postal census takers earn $17.75 per hour in Spartanburg.
In Huntsville, the Census Bureau plans to hire 25 volunteer postal workers who will collect responses from households outside their regular work hours to deliver mail, in the evenings or on weekends. They will identify themselves as Census Bureau employees and receive the same wage of $19.75 per hour as other census takers.
Adding census questions to their routines would be just one of many elements such as weather, traffic and the amount of letters or packages that need to be delivered that mail carriers factor into their workloads each day, Renfro said.
He said: “Message carriers know their people.” “You have some kind of trust already built there.”
The idea of using mail carriers to ask in-person census questions has been floated for decades by proponents who say it would take advantage of an existing workforce and take advantage of mail carriers’ familiarity with households along their routes.
The Government Accountability Office determined in 2011 that using mail carriers to do the work of census takers would not be cost-effective since they are paid much higher wages than temporary census workers.
U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, whose department oversees the Census Bureau, argues that using mail carriers is cheaper than hiring temporary census takers because they are in residents’ homes daily, Postmaster General David Steiner said in an interview with The Associated Press.
Census takers “would go back three, four, five, six times to the same house until they could find someone there,” Steiner recalls Lutnick saying in a conversation. “Who would they rather talk to? Someone who shows up at their door or the mailman that they see every day, that they probably trust a lot, that they probably know.”
But the Census Bureau failed to show how using postal carriers would save money or increase efficiency, 21 Democratic state attorneys general said earlier this month in a letter to the Commerce Department.
A pilot program to use postal workers similar to the 2026 test was planned for Rhode Island’s 2018 Census test, prior to the 2020 Census, but was canceled due to conflicting confidentiality requirements by the Census Bureau and the Postal Service. The household address and whether or not it is vacant will be considered confidential information, which cannot be disclosed, under the Census Bureau’s confidentiality provisions. But the Postal Service is permitted to disclose that information to law enforcement or other agencies under its rules.
Postal workers participating in the 2026 Census test will adhere to all Census Bureau confidentiality provisions, the Census Bureau said Monday. They will also undergo the same training as Census Bureau enumerators and will take a “lifetime oath” to protect the confidentiality of respondents, the bureau said.
The Trump administration made last-minute changes to 2026 Census testing, alarming advocates about problems with the 2030 Census. Four more testing sites were eliminated. The online response to the questionnaire was narrowed to English rather than English, Spanish and Chinese; The test uses questions from the American Community Survey, which contains a citizenship question, rather than the much shorter traditional census form.
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