{"text":[[{"start":4.88,"text":"A few weeks ago, dozens of statisticians met with the Donald Trump-appointed officials overseeing America’s mighty census in a drab conference room, number CC-210A, in Boston’s Thomas M Menino centre."}],[{"start":18.32,"text":"Normally, such meetings are deadly dull. The 10-year Census is crucially important for America: not only is it a pillar of US democracy, it is also a “linchpin of the federal statistical system”, to cite the Supreme Court. But the statisticians who run it tend to be a geeky breed who loathe politics — and the limelight."}],[{"start":37.64,"text":"However, on the afternoon of August 2, the Trump team delivered a bombshell that is highly political ahead of this year’s midterm elections — and amid wider fights about gerrymandering and Trump’s insistence that the 2020 election was rigged."}],[{"start":52.16,"text":"They explained that when America holds its next census, in 2030, technical reforms will make it hard to publish the data about race and gender. The statisticians were shocked, since they — not politicians — usually handle technical reforms."}],[{"start":66.04,"text":"“How worried are you that this may be perceived as a political interference?” asked Steve MacFeely, chief statistician of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. “There will be consequences [from our reform]. That’s unavoidable,” Michael Hawes of the Census Bureau admitted."}],[{"start":81.76,"text":"That is an understatement. Worrying about the state of America’s statistics might not seem that urgent, given all the other explosive political rows swirling in Washington. But voters should pay attention. For at the heart of this story are three key questions: can anyone paint an accurate portrait of what America is today? If so, how should this shape voting processes? And can this data be trusted in an era of manipulation, cyber hacks and artificial intelligence?"}],[{"start":112.8,"text":"This matters. America’s founding fathers realised 250 years ago that you cannot create fair voting systems without measuring the population. So Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution states that Congress should carry out a census in “such manner as they shall by Law direct” every 10 years. Since 1790 census workers have always done that, crossing the country to count people, whether by horse, foot or car (or, in Alaska, on snow sleds)."}],[{"start":135.76,"text":"The Constitution also stipulates that these census results should be used for “apportionment”, to divide the 435 seats in the US House of Representatives among the 50 states, based on each state’s population count. (The allocation in the Senate is permanently fixed.)"}],[{"start":152.24,"text":"This makes it highly political. But it also matters economically: the census shapes how $1.5tn of state aid is distributed each year and is critical to business activity too. Civil rights activists argue this enables a fair apportionment and representation for minorities."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":170,"text":"Today, some voters might wonder why this data can’t be sourced through Big Tech. After all, these companies already track us. But the US census is a “public good”: like weather forecasts, the results are available to all. “Private data doesn’t cover everyone or every business,” says Ron Jarmin, a former top bureau official and 34-year veteran. “The decennial census, for instance, is the only thing we do as a society which tries to touch every single household.”"}],[{"start":197.64,"text":"Trump’s team now want to change this. And that means the question of who should “count” in America today — in an active and passive sense — is about to turn doubly explosive."}],[{"start":207.6,"text":"Tracking these fights is hard, since Washington’s bureaucrats are today so terrified of being personally attacked by political groups that few want to talk in public while in office. John Abowd, the earnest former census chief scientist, for example, has been vilified on rightwing social media."}],[{"start":223.64,"text":"However, one person with a front-row view of these battles and who can discuss them is a digital anthropologist called danah boyd (she styles her name in lower case). Boyd started her career in the early 21st century working for tech companies including Microsoft, where she studied how teenagers use social media, before creating a research centre where she analysed misinformation and how “incels” (young men who are involuntarily celibate) and extremists operate online."}],[{"start":250.04,"text":"Then, in late 2016, just before Trump was elected for the first time, she noticed that far-right activists were starting to discuss how they could hack and manipulate the 2020 census. She was shocked and alerted the bureau, which is part of the Department of Commerce. In 2019 Abowd and his colleagues invited her to lunch and made an unexpected invitation: would she like to enter their ranks?"}],[{"start":272.12,"text":"Boyd was baffled. “I almost said no,” she tells me; like most ordinary mortals, she had previously considered the census a dull research topic. But she also knew, as described in her forthcoming book Data Are Made, Not Found, that since the census is “one of the oldest and most powerful data sets in the world . . . what better place could there be for someone studying the vulnerability and legitimacy of data?”"}],[{"start":298.5,"text":"Moreover, the faceless bureaucrats “wanted a witness”, she says, of their efforts to uphold civil service norms in the face of rising political threats. So she accepted the invitation in the same spirit as the writer Michael Lewis with his 2018 book The Fifth Risk, hoping to chronicle why the administrative state matters. “I had realized that the census was a fantastic example of ‘boring’ infrastructure . . . [that becomes] utterly fascinating when you started digging in.”"}],[{"start":328.8,"text":"It was not the first time the census had stirred controversy. Far from it. Precisely because the census is used for apportionment, there have been debates throughout history about how to count enslaved people, non-citizens and mobile populations including students, alongside funding battles."}],[{"start":345.48,"text":"“The beginning of [our challenges] probably started during the Clinton and Bush administrations with the funding cuts, hiring freezes and outsourcing,” says Jarmin, who — like all the former and current census officials I spoke with — is determinedly non-partisan. “Politics on both sides makes it just hard to do your job on a day-to-day basis.”"}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":366.32,"text":"The man overseeing the bureau as it prepared for the 2020 census was Wilbur Ross, a former private equity leader whom Trump had appointed as commerce secretary. Ross genuinely loved the census, since he worked on it himself in his youth. “I think I did more to support it than any commerce secretary before me,” he tells me, noting that he raised census workers’ pay, expanded funding, introduced digital reforms and personally called 600 mayors in a bid to raise participation rates over 99 per cent, even in tough-to-reach areas such as Alabama. That won him internal respect, census officials tell me."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":401.84,"text":"Yet Ross also faced severe political pressures: some of Trump’s key advisers, including Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon, were determined to remove “illegal aliens”, aka undocumented immigrants, from the census, since they blamed them for skewing the electoral system and distribution of state funds. (On Tuesday, Trump declared on Truth Social that census data showed that “Noncitizens voted illegally!” in 2020 — and “I WON THE ELECTION!”)"}],[{"start":431.54,"text":"So they wanted to include a new question about citizenship in the 2020 census. That might seem unremarkable, given that countries such as Australia and Canada already include this, as do other surveys run by the Census Bureau. “It is just common sense,” Bannon told me in 2020. But many lawyers think it would breach the constitution to use this data for apportionment, Abowd says — while dutifully stressing that ultimately it is “for the courts to decide”. Democrats also fear that a citizenship question might deter some supporters from participating in the census at all."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":466.06,"text":"In June 2019, the Supreme Court rejected the Trump team’s efforts, since it judged their rationale to have been “contrived”. (It did not rule if the question itself was unconstitutional.) However, the long fights undermined the census preparation and, when Covid-19 erupted, the logistical problems and delays became nightmarish (getting accurate results from remote Alaskan Inuit villages was very tough, since it had to be done before the ice melted.) “We really fought to finish it,” says Ross."}],[{"start":496.56,"text":"Eventually, the results were published, slightly late, in April 2021, meaning the all-important apportionment was done after Trump left office. However, this went largely unnoticed at the time, given the dramas around the January 6 uprising, and a new Biden administration. “We were relieved that we were being ignored again,” one census official tells me. “We hoped it would last.”"}],[{"start":519.52,"text":"Not so. By the time the statisticians huddled in room CC-210A in Boston this month to discuss the 2030 census, the mood had turned sour. In 2021, the Biden administration started undoing what its predecessors had done. But that sowed more chaos. “What progressives do can sometimes also be counter-productive,” says boyd. Then, when Trump won a second term in 2024, Maga luminaries like Miller restarted their census campaign — but this time with far better organisation."}],[{"start":549.24,"text":"One of their objectives is a renewed effort to add a citizenship question: their appointees at the bureau have created a draft memo, which I have seen, that reads: “Application of this rule would exclude illegal aliens and other groups of foreign citizens from the population count for congressional apportionment.”"}],[{"start":566.04,"text":"A second — less obvious — battle is around privacy. Back in 1954, Congress passed a bill which includes a “Title 13” law that prevents any census publication “whereby the data furnished by any particular establishment or individual under this title can be identified”."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":582.44,"text":"It used to be easy to uphold such privacy, since paper census surveys were locked away in cabinets, and nobody could crunch the data to identify individuals. From the 1960s onwards, more privacy protections were added, for example by swapping micro-level data from very small regions, where individuals might be at risk of being re-identified, with similar data from nearby areas. But today hackers can potentially use powerful computers — and AI — to cross-compare different data sets to identify people far more easily. “Re-identification is becoming a problem for every statistical system in the world,” says the OECD’s MacFeely. The Census Bureau thus faces contradictory mandates: it wants to both publish detailed data and stop leaks."}],[{"start":625.72,"text":"How should governments respond? Some Silicon Valley figures might simply say we need to accept that we “have zero privacy anyway” today, to cite the infamous comment by Scott McNealy, then chief executive officer of Sun Microsystems, almost three decades ago."}],[{"start":640.12,"text":"But no tech titan — or politician — would dare say that today, given voter distrust of Big Tech and government. So for the 2020 census, under Abowd, the bureau implemented “fuzzing” tools, including a complex mathematical system called “differential privacy”, invented in the early 2000s by Cynthia Dwork, a computer scientist at Harvard, among others."}],[{"start":663.56,"text":"Abowd has won several awards for this reform, which most statisticians applaud. “[This] is an output noise infusion technique, and every major English-speaking national statistical office already does output noise infusion techniques,” he tells me. Or as Simson Garfinkel, a former census official, notes in a recent book: “It isn’t often that government agencies are leaders in technology, but with differential privacy, they can be.”"}],[{"start":689.8,"text":"Some social scientists — including those on the left — are uneasy about “fuzzing”. However, Maga groups are very critical. The Center for Renewing America, an organisation created by Russell Vought, a top Trump adviser and official, for example, argues that “the 2020 Census was the most inaccurate and unreliable in modern American history” — because of “fuzzing”. “Fourteen states had statistically significant overcounts or undercounts, resulting in at least six seats in the House of Representatives being illegitimately awarded to Democrats.”"}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":723.92,"text":"On Monday, George Cook, the Trump-appointed acting head of the Census Bureau, released a statement in which he proposed to ban “noise infusion” for the 2030 census, only permitting two methods of “disclosure avoidance”: “coarsening” and “suppression”, ie dramatically reducing the detail of data, or not publishing it at all. “That means [the census] will lose most of its value for business,” says Abowd. “I don’t think politicians will accept it for redistricting either.”"}],[{"start":752.12,"text":"In recent weeks, numerous theories have floated around about why Trump is pushing these reforms. Some blame it on the president’s wider distrust of technical expertise and the administrative state, and/or a desire to shape the apportionment process for Republicans’ benefit."}],[{"start":766.64,"text":"Others think that Big Tech hates “fuzzed” data because it is less useful for training AI models — or that Republicans want private sector, profit-seeking companies to offer data services instead of the government. And I have heard a darker theory voiced too: that if the Trump team curb public data, it will be easier to define “the truth”. “It’s the playbook of any authoritarian government — if there is less data, you create your own reality, and people with access to data become more powerful,” one senior academic told me. Or, as boyd says: “I don’t know if the [Trump team] are trying to delegitimise data but that is the consequence of what they are doing.”"}],[{"start":809.28,"text":"But the Trump appointees deny this. On Wednesday this week, Cook — together with Michael Lachanski, another bureau official — met with statisticians again, this time on a video call, and insisted that they are the ones trying to “regain trust” in census results by removing the “noise” that might make the data seem fake."}],[{"start":829.04,"text":"A Native American representative pointed out that if this caused mass “suppression” of micro-level data for small communities, it would have damaging consequences. Cook, speaking from the bureau’s Los Angeles office, promised to “engage” with worried communities via “a listening tour” to reassure them."}],[{"start":847.04,"text":"There is no easy solution. And while many Democrats argue that Americans need to discuss and measure race to tackle inequities, this is not the view of census leaders now. “Residence . . . [and] allegiance should be colorblind and should not depend on or be distorted in any way by any immaterial personal characteristics, such as race,” the draft memo notes."}],[{"start":868.92,"text":"Either way, since the reforms to the 2030 Census have to be approved by April 2027, a bitter fight now looms. That leaves statisticians caught in the middle — again. Many top bureau officials have recently left. “Trust between the career staff and political appointees is lower than I have ever seen,” says one former census official."}],[{"start":889.56,"text":"And if the political controversy intensifies, that creates another risk: the public might simply shun the census in 2030. After all, one oddity about the word “data” is that its linguistic roots derive from “dare”, “to give” in Latin; “data” means “that which is given”. That is no accident: statistics emerge from a social contract, not by magic. And if trust is shattered, it is hard to rebuild. Who “counts” in America thus matters deeply now. Think of that as the midterms get under way."}],[{"start":920.68,"text":"Gillian Tett is an FT columnist, provost of King’s College, Cambridge, and co-host of the FT podcast ‘The Story of Money’"}],[{"start":928.4,"text":"Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram, Bluesky and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning"}],[{"start":940.8,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1787531927_9930.mp3"}