Census Bureau To Scrap Handhelds — Cost $3 Billion

GovTechGuy writes "The Census Bureau will tell a House panel today that it will drop plans to use handheld computers to help count Americans for the 2010 census, increasing the cost for the decennial census by as much as $3 billion, according to testimony the Commerce Department secretary plans to give this afternoon."

Comments

Surplus

[Jhon]

Will they sell the hand-helds? Or give them away like Cheese in the 80's?

Re:Surplus

[MightyMartian]

Generally when you are trying out new technology, you choose a few locales to be testbeds. That way you can determine whether or not the technology will work as advertised, and if it does, it gives you a chance to correct any bugs. To go out and buy three billion dollars worth the equipment and then decide that it doesn't work suggests to me that there are some severely incompetent people at the top of the chain.

I feel the same way about voting machines. Test them out in a few places, get to know the equipment, and if you still figure it's going to work, you have a place to go. But this mass exodus from one system to another is just lunacy.

It's all borrowed anyway...

[bstarrfield]

Just another example of the mind boggling inefficiency and ineffectiveness of the current American administration. $3 billion dollars would cover roughly a week of expenses in Iraq - so the sum must be inconsequential.

Or - $3 billion dollars could pay for the college tuition of thousands of students, could dramatically raise NSF funding, or could help rebuild our roads. Don't these people even shame anymore?

One of the fun points about this is that the current Administration was elected (partially) on their supposed business expertise. Which appears to be actually true as many major businesses flub their own large scale IT projects.

Well - given that we're running a fantastic deficit, we'll just throw the extra costs of the the census project into our staggering debt.