Jeff Meisel: Government Innovation and the 2020 Census

Heinz Radio

This week, Jeff Meisel sits down with Collin T Hayes to discuss his experience working in the federal government and the 2020 census, which will be the first ever to be conducted online. Jeff discusses the path that led him to public service after a career in the tech industry (2:18). He also explains some of the initiatives that he worked on at the Census Bureau and the Department of Commerce to innovate these bureaucracies (3:20). Jeff worked in the federal government from 2014 to 2018, and he discusses his experience of the presidential transition from his perspective at Commerce (10:01). He also describes some of the programs and initiatives that he introduced to keep the agency's employees up to date with the current technology and to attract new talent to the department (12:11). Jeff also recommends that everyone take the opportunity to engage in public service (16:43). In the second half of our conversation, Jeff discusses the importance of the census to our democracy and talks about the process of developing the first ever online census (19:00). Jeff also weighs in on the controversy surrounding the Trump administration's efforts to include a citizenship question on the census (25:53) and disinformation efforts that could cause under-counting (31:20)

You can follow Jeff on Twitter @jffmsl. Learn more about the 2020 Census here: www.census.gov/2020census Follow Heinz Radio on Twitter @HeinzRadio, on Instagram @heinz_radio, and on Facebook. Visit our website heinz-radio.com for up to date information and feel free to send us your feedback. Music for the intro and outro is provided by Audiobinger: http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Audiobinger/~/Random_Thoughts