The census makes politics. Representatives are allocated to states based on the count of the population, and states redistrict their maps accordingly. Thus, it’s perhaps not surprising that different partisan forces work behind the scenes to make census data in their own image. 

In advance of the 2030 Census, the Trump Administration has recently announced that it plans to drastically upend an esoteric set of rules known as the “residence rules.” These are the protocols that dictate who is counted where for the upcoming census. Although Congress is ultimately responsible for overseeing the census and determining the rules, it absconded with that responsibility decades ago. This has created a vulnerability that the Trump administration seeks to exploit. In changing the rules, the Trump administration is hoping to alter the political map. As TPM has reported, civil servants have been ordered to stay silent. 

Data Are Made, Not Found: A Story of Politics, Power, and the Civil Servants Who Saved the US Census tells the story of what it took for dedicated bureaucrats to pull off the 2020 Census, despite a pandemic, natural disasters, financial constraints, and political interference. This book shows what it takes to make the census so that each and every one of us can fight to ensure that democracy’s data remain intact and legitimate. The ins and outs of who gets counted where might seem boring, but this is what makes the process so vulnerable to interference. When the public and our elected officials do not pay attention to details, technocratic moves become a form of policymaking by other means.

Despite facing widespread criticism from both the left and the right, civil servants are neither dumb nor malfeasant. They are dedicated to ensuring democracy can continue regardless of who is in the White House. But for them to be effective, we need to have their backs. And we need to understand why they make the choices they make when facing the constraints they face. 

In this short excerpt from “Data Are Made, Not Found,” I describe one of many earlier partisan fights over the residence rules. Despite decades of precedent, Republicans have long aimed to count students at their parents’ homes instead of where they reside during the academic term. The Covid-19 pandemic created the perfect opportunity for Republicans to pursue this agenda without seeking congressional approval. As the book goes on to show, the civil servants executed the rules that had been delivered to Congress years earlier. As a result, depending on one’s political orientation, civil servants were deemed either heroes or villains. But in their minds, they were simply following protocol.

In the United States, eighteen-year-olds might technically be independent adults, but the vast majority of them are bureaucratically attached to their parents or guardians in many ways. College students are often still dependent on their parents for healthcare—and many parents claim their adult children as dependents for taxpurposes. Parents also tend to conceptually understand their young adult children as members of their household. After all, college students may leave their parents’ homes to attend school elsewhere, but they often return to their childhood rooms during breaks.

Needless to say, 2020 was different. Across the country, parents who had sent........

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