We would add that FedEx and UPS use handheld computers to track more than 22 million packages, all over the world, each and every day. Their computers work because their business depends on it. So you can know, up to the minute, when your Amazon shipment left Memphis, when it touched down in Parsippany and when it got loaded on the truck for delivery to your house. And yet the Census Bureau, with a decade to plan for it and hundreds of millions of dollars to spend, could not come up with a handheld computer to record the ages, races and addresses of those who don’t respond to the mailed census survey.
And yet we want this institution to have more responsibility for our health care system? For our retirement “security”? For our defense?
