Rep. Ted Poe on Census Jobs Claims

This is a rush transcript from "Your World With Neil Cavuto," June 7, 2010. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

NEIL CAVUTO, ANCHOR: Well, the Labor Department says that it’s not double and triple-counting Census jobs.

My guest isn’t so sure of that. He thinks it could be a scam. Republican Congressman Ted Poe of Texas joining me right now.

Congressman, there’s no proof of that. You’ve heard from the agencies involved in it. Mr. Crudele himself was reporting no indications of that. What makes you suspect otherwise?

REP. TED POE R-TEXAS: Well, because it appears Census workers themselves are telling us that they are counted more than once for their jobs.

It’s interesting. The Census Bureau is in the numbers business, and they don’t even have the correct numbers on how many people work for the Census Bureau. So, I think that it appears that they’re being counted more than once. We have to find out exactly what the truth is with the number counters.

CAVUTO: Well, Congressmen, what is different now vs. the last go-round, the last time we had Census a decade ago or the decade before that? Are the numbers just bigger because there are more people and everything is more expensive, or is there something unique in this circumstance?

POE: Well, we have more people, yes, but we’re spending a whole lot more money to count people in the United States.

And, as your previous person said, that’s $11 billion. And we need to account for all of that money. And where is the Census Bureau spending spend that money to count everybody in the United States? We’re not sure about that yet.

CAVUTO: All right. This issue about front-loading the number of workers up front, in other words — that makes no sense, I should say, but just, in other words, putting the biggest number immediately, if that were to address retraining and all of that that could be very expensive, what’s wrong with that?

POE: No business is going to say to itself, well, we’re going to hire more workers than we really need because we may need them, and then, when we don’t use those people, we’re going to pay them for not working.

Only the federal government would obviously hire more people than it needs for a program, and then pay them not to work. And they say that is saving money? I don’t see how that saves money to do that.

And, of course, in the business world, no one would do that, saying that they’re going to save money hiring people they don’t need.

CAVUTO: It is a little weird.

Congressman, thank you very much. Always a pleasure.

(LAUGHTER)

POE: Thank you, Neil.

CAVUTO: All right.

Content and Programming Copyright 2010 Fox News Network, Inc. Copyright 2010 Roll Call, Inc. All materials herein are protected by United States copyright law and may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, displayed, published or broadcast without the prior written permission of Roll Call. You may not alter or remove any trademark, copyright or other notice from copies of the content.