Author: Steve Jost, Consultant, The Census Project
Standard Deviations blog posts represent the views of the author/organization, but not necessarily those of The Census Project.
Data Are Made, Not Found: A Story of Politics, Power, and the Civil Servants Who Saved the US Census
danah boyd
The University of Chicago Press
September 2026 Release
A small but important class of roughly 15,000 career scientists, demographers, program managers, interviewers, budget analysts, IT specialists, and researchers have the rare privilege of seeing the inside of the 13-year process to carry out what former Director, Dr. Ken Prewitt called the largest peace-time mobilization of the government – the Decennial Census. A new book lets you into their world. Data Are Made, Not Found gives the reader a rare inside view of planning, preparing and executing the 2020 Decennial Census.
Author danah boyd is an American technology and social media scholar, a partner researcher at Microsoft Research, the founder of the Data & Society Research Institute and serves as Professor of Communication at Cornell University. Her book explains how she received unprecedented access to the Bureau and it’s professional staff leading up to the 2020 national head count.
If you are a civil servant, you will love this warts-and-all portrayal of those who serve in government. Just read the introduction, and your chest should swell with pride as it does for so many who walk into the Census Bureau headquarters everyday and see their mission statement in two-foot silver letters high above the lobby. They quote Article I, Section II, Clause III of the Constitution, the “Census clause.”
With her unique access over several years, boyd captures the culture of working at the Census Bureau. Famously non-partisan in their work, she discovers one employee when probed on the politics of the census-making, “…[h]e explained that the Census Bureau was deeply, devoutly political. ‘Our religion is data and our political party is data.’”
Most of the book demonstrates that devotion is not believed much outside the Bureau, especially at the White House or in Congress. The angle of boyd’s tale of 2020 is a political one. While some political scientists might disagree with her characterizations of certain political actors, they would uniformly agree with her point that they generally don’t make the Bureau’s work any easier and often muck things up.
To boyd, 2020 was a superhuman success. Facing rare and incredible head winds like the pandemic, uncertain funding for testing and dress rehearsals, and a schedule micro-managed by court decisions and political whims, in the end the heroes are the career professionals who pulled off their mission in spite of these challenges. It was no small feat, and even census folks with many decennials of experience had major doubts along the way that they could pull this one off.
Like it’s recent predecessors following the innovation of mail out/mail back for 1970 decennial, a pattern emerged. Roughly two thirds of the American population “self-responded” by answering online or mailing a return or calling in their answers. The Bureau then had to hire a workforce ultimately of 500,000 temporary workers to go to 34 million addresses that did not respond. This follow-up phase has proven to be the costliest share of the $14 billion life cycle cost for the Decennial.
As boyd shares in her book: “Getting data about 90 percent of the US public is easy, the civil servant explained. Getting the next 9 percent is hard work, but it is not impossible. The real challenge is ensuring that the final 1 percent are counted—even if they hide from the government, even if they refuse to respond, and even if they cannot be tracked down in person. The census needed the advertising firm to focus on reaching this 1 percent.” That is a normal census, not one where homeowners were fearful of visitors during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Data Are Made, Not Found is a timely and useful primer on the current controversies in the run up to the 2030 count. Many of the players make return roles. boyd’s history is an easy read, often frustrating, but mostly truth telling. It will prepare you for what is ahead.
