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The Census Bureau Is Overrun With Staffers From a MAGA Think Tank
Multiple staffers at a Trump-aligned policy think tank have burrowed their way into the US Census Bureau, where they have access to sensitive data and have contributed to a public report that bolsters conspiracy theories undermining trust in elections ahead of the midterms. In August, the Census Bureau published an anonymously authored report titled “Noncitizen Voting in the 2020 Election: A Beginning Analysis,” claiming to show that thousands of noncitizens voted in the 2020 election. A WIRED investigation revealed that the report appeared to employ faulty methodology, casting its conclusions into doubt, and that two of its authors work for the America First Policy Institute, a right-wing think tank with deep ties to the Trump administration. Now WIRED has found that the two authors are part of a larger team, made up almost entirely of AFPI members, who have been detailed to the Census Bureau and given access to its data. The Census Bureau is home to vast troves of sensitive data on nearly every person living in the country, which is used for apportioning and drawing congressional districts as well as allocating federal funding based on population sizes. Experts and Census employees who spoke to WIRED worry that the noncitizen voting report is the first salvo in Census data possibly being used to undermine the results of the upcoming midterms or the 2028 presidential election. A Census employee who spoke to WIRED on the condition of anonymity says that there has historically been “nothing close” to what AFPI is doing at the bureau. “Frankly, it's disrespectful to the institution,” they say. The Trump administration has repeatedly attempted to cast doubt on the accuracy of Census data in order to reshape elections. Earlier this year, WIRED reported that the Department of Commerce, which oversees the bureau, was circulating a rule change that would eliminate noncitizens from being counted in the Census, a move that could drastically reshape how Congressional districts are drawn. Republicans also took aim at a little-known statistical method called differential privacy that is used to protect the privacy of individual respondents, alleging that it makes the Census count inaccurate in ways that favor Democrats in congressional apportionment. AFPI, meanwhile, has been integral to shaping the Trump administration’s policies and makeup. Brooke Rollins, who served as the group’s first CEO, is now the secretary of agriculture, and Linda McMahon, now the secretary of education, used to sit on the organization’s board. Former AFPI staffers have found their way to some of the highest ranks of the Trump administration, including former attorney general Pam Bondi, secretary of Veterans Affairs Doug Collins, secretary of Housing and Urban Development Scott Turner, Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lee Zeldin, US permanent representative to NATO Matthew Whitaker, deputy director of White House Domestic Policy Council Heidi Overton, and National Economic Council of the United States director Kevin Hassett. In addition to Matthew Jensen and Jeff McCrea, the two AFPI members previously identified by WIRED, at least five other AFPI members have been or are currently staffed at the Census Bureau, according to sources and documents reviewed by WIRED. Sources who spoke to WIRED confirmed that all the AFPI members are detailed to the agency through the Intergovernmental Personnel Act (IPA), which allows people with specialized skills from certain institutions, like nonprofits and universities, to work for the government for up to two years on a temporary appointment. The Census Bureau and AFPI did not respond to requests for comment. John Abowd, former associate director for research and methodology and chief scientist at the Census Bureau, says that having so many people from a single organization would be “unusual.” Among the names viewed by WIRED are Max Kossek, a researcher at AFPI’s Office for Fiscal and Regulatory Analysis, and Ryan Montgomery, who the website lists as a program assistant with the same AFPI office. Montgomery’s LinkedIn profile, however, says that he is now a “research engineer” at AFPI. AFPI’s director for secure elections policy, Thomas Lane, is also listed as one of the employees that has been detailed to the Census Bureau. Lane, a former Trump campaign staffer and election denier, was subpoenaed by the Department of Justice in 2022 as part of its investigation into the president’s attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. (Lane was not charged by law enforcement.) In a 2020 video posted by the Arizona Republican Party, where a group of fake electors attempted to deliver the state’s electoral votes to Donald Trump, Politico identified a man wearing a jacket with the name “Lane” on it passing out the documents for the electors to sign making them “duly elected” and “qualified.” In 2024, CNN reported that Lane was prepared to serve as a backup elector for that same group. Earlier this year, Democracy Docket reported that Lane helped write part of an early version of the Save America Act, the law that would require voter ID to register to vote, while working for the Republican majority House Committee on House Administration. Parts of the Save Act have also been included in the separate Save America Act, which, if passed, would require proof of citizenship in order to vote, a move that experts say could disenfranchise more than 20 million people. Kossek, Montgomery, and Lane did not respond to requests for comment. David Peterson, who AFPI lists as a research engineer with expertise in “computing, machine learning, and advanced software architecture,” and Jackson Mejia, an AFPI fellow who is an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin with a PhD in economics from MIT focusing on tax policy, also appear to be detailed to the Census Bureau. Peterson and Mejia did not respond to requests for comment. Another person, listed as an IPA from AFPI, Michael Corey, is also listed among the group at the bureau. AFPI does not list Corey as a staff member on its website, but an AFPI email with Corey’s name does appear to exist. AFPI did not confirm whether Corey was currently associated with the think tank. Danah Boyd, a professor at Cornell University who studies the census, says that there are vehicles like the American Association for the Advancement of Science through which agencies like the Census Bureau might bring in multiple IPAs. But AFPI, Boyd says, “is not an institution that is set up to bring all the scientists in the world together or that has built this long-standing infrastructure of doing independent statistical research. This is a partisan group with an agenda,” she claims. All of the AFPI members are listed under the same project, focused on “ad hoc data analyses” to answer questions from senior leaders at Census and the Department of Commerce, according to documentation viewed by WIRED. The project appears to be led by Michael Lachanski, the bureau’s recently appointed deputy director for data, policy, and science, and a former fellow at the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank that also has connections to the Trump administration. Lachanski is a political appointee. All of the AFPI detailees appear to have the “special sworn status” necessary to access sensitive Census data. Recent reporting from Talking Points Memo found that the Census Bureau’s Data Stewardship Executive Policy charter had been updated in July to remove stipulations that prevented political appointees from interfering with the bureau’s data. Another Census employee, who spoke to WIRED on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press, says that access to Census data is only allowed through approved “projects,” where employees and researchers have to explain how they're going to use the data and what they're going to produce. The employee says that it’s not unheard of to have multiple people from the same outside institution on the same project, but there appears to be a lack of civil servants involved in this one. The project’s “explicit reference to answering questions of interest to political appointees” is concerning, the employee says. Boyd says this kind of work is a clear departure from the bureau’s mandate, which does not include providing data to political appointees. “These are all part of culture norms and practices of how you make certain you run a transparent agency to ensure that you are doing good by the American people,” she says. There is precedent for political pressure at the Census Bureau: In 2021, less than two weeks after the January 6 insurrection at the end of Trump’s first term, then US Census Bureau director Steven Dillingham announced his resignation after a letter from the Office of the Inspector General revealed that whistleblowers had come forward to allege Census workers had been pressured by political appointees to create a report showing the citizenship status of every US resident.
