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On The Cusp of an Historic Day

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Almost every week the Census Bureau releases statistical information to inform the society about how it’s doing. Sometimes the statistics reflect economic activity in the US; sometimes, the statistics report on the status of the American public.

Once every decade there is a unique release of statistics – the state population counts based on a just-finished decennial census. Indeed, this particular event evoked the name of our general-purpose statistical agency – the “Census” Bureau.

For this decade, the day will be December 21, 2010.

From my perch right now, I perceive this event as the culmination of millions of hours of people’s time. This data release includes the time invested by each respondent who spent about 10 minutes completing the 2010 census form. It includes over a million census staff members who visited housing units throughout the country to collect census data. It includes millions of people working as our volunteer partners, getting the word out to their communities about the value of participating in the census.

Congress has charged the Census Bureau with doing the arithmetic to compute the number of Members in the U.S. House of Representatives, and we’ll present this report on Tuesday. I encourage you to view this nifty video about how the computation of apportionment is done.

The event announcement will not contain much information; we will announce the official national population count. We will report the state resident population for all states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. We report the total populations for these groups, reflecting the federal agency staffs that are assigned to non-U.S. stations for which their parent agencies have provided counts.

You can see the kind of statistics that we will release on this interactive map.

Tuesday is an important day for the country; we are grateful for this opportunity to serve it.

Page Last Revised - March 22, 2022
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