With its budget a mess and a task force trying to figure out how it will be able to afford to conduct the nationwide census in 2020 — a head count required by the US Constitution — the Census Bureau is cutting back.

Because of budget slices, the Census Bureau is dropping trials it was to have conducted in West Virginia and Washington state.

The bureau is trying to find new, higher-tech ways to get responses from people that don’t require house-to-house surveying.

John H. Thompson, the soon-to-be-exiting director of the Census Bureau, probably wants to solve this issue before he leaves toward the end of the year.

But he has had four years to figure it out — and he hasn’t.