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The White House and House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s office have reached a tentative agreement to let the Census Bureau test its hotly debated method for estimating the country’s population, officials said Friday.
The proposal would allow the Census Bureau to test the use of statistical sampling next year, a procedure the bureau would like to use for the 2000 census.
The bureau also would have to conduct a second test next year, this one of a census using traditional methods but employing more ads and census-form mailings and a higher ratio of door-to-door head counters than in the past.
Republicans have attacked sampling as legally suspect and politically harmful.
