The difficulties you mention are entirely related to the operational costs of carrying out the census. I see no justification for the data collection system itself to cost over $900 million.
You understand this isn't a dumb mobile app someone types something into with a simple server backend right?
It's the system that manages and handles the operational data collection and statistical analysis for the census.
It's not a CRUD app bob types something into at the end of the day. It manages the whole effort.
I think that is the key takeaway here.
This is not as easy as you make it sound. For instance, how would you make sure you counted every transient effectively?
The way the census solves that problem is to go out and count all of them in a single night.
That's a level of accuracy mot people couldn't even begin to plan for. If you tasked FedEx with that problem, they'd probably find all the easy people and then hand off the rest to the USPS like they do for excessively rural customers.
So far this is a simple "business" program (there's nothing that requires inventing new Computer Science things, or new hardware, or writing a kernel module, or designing for ultra large storage, or ultra low latency, or global consistency), the requirements should be listed by order of importance by the Census stats and ops team, field teams, administrators; then ask a few teams to come up with a high-level sketch; select 3 of the designs, let 3-5 teams prototype and then assign the remaining of the work to the team that was the most competent.
It's not a 900 000 000 dollars job. That means you can employ thousands of Google engineers for a year to build it. That's insanely expensive.
- Research and Data Analytics
- Strategic Planning, Program Development, and Integration
- Communications Support for Decennial Census Operations and Other Programs
- Field Recruitment Advertising and Communications
- Traditional Advertising and Media Buying
- Digital Advertising and Other Communications Technologies
- Social Media
- Public Relations
- Communications Planning and Materials for the Partnership Program
- Statistics in Schools Program
- Website Development and Digital Engagement
- Rapid Response Activities
- Project and Financial Management
- Stakeholders Relations
- Communications Support for the 2020 Census Data Dissemination
I don't think your simple plan will ever come up with something that covers all the requirements in finite time.
How long do you think it takes "3-5 teams" to prototype something covering even a miniscule amount of the above?
This is not surprising though, SV always thinks it has some idea how to solve government scale problems, but most "problem solving" in SV is done by eliminating the customers you don't want to care about.
But this is a communications campaign, a PR/PSA whatever, and recruitment and so on.
The actual IT systems for the census seem to be in-house developed by the Census Bureau. (Or at least the prototype was, and it's already in place.)