Former US Census Bureau director John Thompson, who guided preparations for 2020 head count, dies

BEND, Ore. (AP) — John Thompson, who guided preparations for the 2020 census as director of the U.S. Census Bureau, has died.

Thompson died May 9 at his home in Bend, Oregon. He was 73.

Thompson was confirmed in 2013 as the Census Bureau’s 24th director after being nominated by President Barack Obama. He departed in 2017 following the election of President Donald Trump to his first term but helped lay the groundwork for many of the innovations implemented in the 2020 head count.

Those included the utilization of smart phones and the widespread use of online responses, which were instrumental in helping the bureau to navigate one of the most difficult censuses in U.S. history during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“He guided preparations for the 2020 census, which became our nation’s most automated and technically advanced ever,” Ron Jarmin, the current acting director of the Census Bureau, said in a statement. “With his decades of experience as a public servant, he understood the importance of our agency’s organizational health and made it a priority.”

After earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Virginia Tech, Thompson joined the Census Bureau in 1975 and rose to the position of associate director for decennial census programs, which put him in charge of all aspects of the 2000 census. He helped pioneer optical scanning and intelligent character recognition, which allowed handwritten items on census forms to be converted into responses, according to the statistical agency.

The head count figures collected during the once-a-decade census are used to allocate states’ congressional seats and Electoral College votes, and help determine the distribution of federal funding.

Thompson left the Census Bureau in 2002 for more than a decade to work at the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center, eventually becoming its president and CEO. At NORC, Thompson was the project manager for the National Immunization Surveys, which was the the largest telephone social science survey in the United States at the time.

“It would be hard to overstate John’s influence on NORC and its people,” Dan Gaylin, president and CEO of NORC, said in a statement. “John’s confident, empowering, values-driven leadership enabled the people of NORC to see that future and make it a reality.”

After leaving the Census Bureau in 2017, Thompson became executive director of the Council of Professional Associations for Federal Statistics for a year before retiring in 2018.

Thompson is survived by his wife, Bonnie, and three children.

___

The Associated Press and NORC are partners in the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, which conducts survey research on a variety of topics.