A Complete Waste

I'm sure that most of you, like me, recently received a letter from the United States Government, telling you about the upcoming 2010 Census. This letter more or less tells us about the importance of the census and how it is used in part to determine the appropriation of government funding to various areas of our country.
Why is the letter at all necessary? Why do millions of dollars in postage, paper, man power, etc. have to be wasted to inform us that this census is arriving in about a week? Couldn't they just mail the census and attach an explanatory cover letter? Couldn't this be done in all one mailing without wasting millions of dollars in taxpayer money?
All of this revenue could have been so much better utilized. In fact they could have justified the letter if they included some kind of a link that allowed the general public to sign up for an electronic version of the census. Just by "going green" we could have saved an exorbitant amount of money in postage and paper by not mailing the census to those of us who'd be willing to do this online.
Unfortunately, this is yet another example of the shortsightedness of our democratically elected leaders and government employees at large. A mailing to notify us to expect a future mailing... Please!