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Anonymously authored Census report on noncitizen voting tied to AFPI staffers embedded in the bureau
WIRED found at least seven America First Policy Institute members detailed into the Census Bureau with access to its data. The August report two of them worked on went out anonymously under the bureau's name.
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What happened
- The Census Bureau published an anonymously authored report in August claiming to show that thousands of noncitizens voted in the 2020 election.
- WIRED reported the analysis appeared to employ faulty methodology and that two of its authors work for the America First Policy Institute, a think tank tied to the Trump administration.
- Beyond those two authors, at least five more AFPI members have been or are currently staffed at the bureau, according to sources and documents reviewed by WIRED.
Compiled by The Product DeskSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- exposure Anyone citing bureau outputs in a rate filing, a redistricting brief, or a funding model now inherits an authorship question the PDF leaves open. The answer sits with a detail arrangement they cannot see.
- decision Data owners have to decide whether publication on a federal domain is sufficient warrant. The alternative is treating a named owning office and a versioned methodology document as the minimum before a number enters a model.
- precedent One unsigned analysis carrying the bureau's imprimatur makes the next one easier to publish and harder to contest on process, since the author of record goes unnamed.
- constraint The fight over differential privacy means the disclosure protections that let the bureau release detailed tables at all are now a political target.
An analyst pulling that August report into a slide deck gets a census.gov URL and a title, with no author listed to email.
The route in is ordinary paperwork. The Intergovernmental Personnel Act lets someone with specialized skills at a nonprofit or a university work for the federal government for up to two years on a temporary appointment. Sources told WIRED that is how every AFPI member at the bureau got there [5]. John Abowd, the bureau's former associate director for research and methodology and its former chief scientist, said that having so many people from a single organization would be "unusual" [8]. A Census employee who spoke to WIRED anonymously said there has historically been "nothing close" to what AFPI is doing at the bureau. "Frankly, it's disrespectful to the institution," they said [7].
Access is the part that matters downstream. The bureau holds sensitive record-level data on nearly every person living in the country, and that data feeds apportionment, congressional district lines, and federal funding allocations based on population size [6]. Experts and Census employees told WIRED they worry the noncitizen voting report is the first salvo in Census data being used to undermine the results of the coming midterms or the 2028 presidential election [14].
WIRED's reporting shows no changes to the bureau's recurring statistical products. The methodology problem it identified sits in that one report [2]. Pressure on the series teams actually build on turns up elsewhere in the same reporting. Commerce circulated a rule change earlier this year that would eliminate noncitizens from being counted in the Census, and WIRED reported the move could drastically reshape how congressional districts are drawn [12]. Republicans have separately gone after differential privacy, the method used to protect individual respondents, alleging it makes the count inaccurate in ways that favor Democrats in apportionment [13].
Among the names WIRED viewed are Max Kossek, a researcher in AFPI's Office for Fiscal and Regulatory Analysis, and Ryan Montgomery. AFPI lists Montgomery as a program assistant in the same office, and his LinkedIn profile now says "research engineer" [10]. AFPI's director for secure elections policy, Thomas Lane, a former Trump campaign staffer and election denier, is also listed as detailed to the bureau. Lane was subpoenaed by the Justice Department in 2022 [9]. The Census Bureau and AFPI did not respond to WIRED's requests for comment [11].
A number on a federal domain comes with a URL and a filename, and teams read that as provenance.
Every federal number in your stack falls into one of two piles. The first holds recurring series where you can name the vintage you pinned, the methodology document you can cite, and the office that owns the product. The second holds one-off analyses that appeared on a government domain. Pile one can carry a decision you will defend in a deposition or a board meeting. Pile two is an authored claim, and its anonymity is a property of the file.
The cost is real: a page of documentation per series, plus the argument with whoever wants to skip it because the download works fine. Most quarters it sits unused. In the quarter it matters, it tells you which dashboards to pull, because you wrote down who made the number and when.
What to watch
- Whether Commerce's circulated rule change on excluding noncitizens from the count becomes a published proposal.
- Whether the bureau attaches named authorship and a methodology document to the August noncitizen voting report.
- Whether the AFPI details run to the two-year Intergovernmental Personnel Act limit or end sooner.