NEW: Understanding CS3D: The New EU Law That Could Cost U.S. Industry Trillions — First in a new article series in collaboration with Baron Public Affairs. Read and share!

SEE ALSO: Our Publisher Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry has a new op-ed in the Washington Post on the administration's new H-1B visa fee policy.

Let's Dig Into This Census Bidness

The 2020 Census has become a rallying point for conservatives concerned about electoral integrity, and rightfully so. Which is why we felt we needed to dig in deeper on a policy brief from the Center for Renewing America on the 2020 Census, to try to understand exactly what went wrong, and whether it's as bad as conservatives say.

The brief, authored by Wade Miller and Andrew White, argues that two interconnected issues demand immediate attention: egregious counting errors that shifted congressional seats to Democrats, and an opaque algorithmic process called "differential privacy" that makes verification nearly impossible.

Let's start with the raw numbers, which are damning. The Census Bureau itself admitted that the 2020 Census miscounted populations in fourteen states, an error rate unprecedented in modern census history. For context, the 2010 Census had an error rate of just 0.01 percent, equivalent to about 36,000 people nationwide. In 2020, Texas alone was undercounted by more than 560,000 people.

The pattern of these errors is what raises eyebrows. Eight states were overcounted—Delaware, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Rhode Island, and Utah. Six states were undercounted—Arkansas, Florida, Illinois, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Texas. Tell us if you notice anything about the overcounted states and the undercounted states. When you tally up the political impact, the result was a net shift of at least six congressional seats favoring Democrats. Florida should have gained two additional seats. Texas should have gained one more. Colorado gained a seat it didn't deserve, while Minnesota and Rhode Island each kept seats they should have lost.

The Census Bureau's explanation? Disruptions related to Covid, particularly affecting group quarters like college dormitories and nursing homes. But here's where things get murky. The brief raises troubling questions about whether the bureau counted empty dorms as occupied or used statistical adjustment methods—approaches that may have been illegal under existing law.

Now we get to the technical heart of the matter, and this is where things become genuinely concerning for anyone who cares about electoral integrity. Starting in 2020, the Census Bureau implemented a methodology called "differential privacy." This is an expression we've seen a lot since we started researching this issue, and so we wanted to dig into it. "Differential privacy" sounds really stupid, but apparently it really is real, and it is a process that intentionally alters accurate data into false data using an algorithm.

Here's how it works. Imagine a census block in Wisconsin with 500 people: 240 men, 260 women, 300 adults, 400 white individuals, and 100 black individuals. Differential privacy randomly changes these numbers. Suddenly, that block shows 484 people, with different demographic breakdowns. Or it might show 518 people. The changes can swing in either direction. The idea, presumably, is that because the errors are random, they cancel each other out. They might, but also they might not.

But why do this to begin with? The Census Bureau's justification is privacy protection, making it harder to identify individuals from data. That sounds reasonable on its face. But the implementation creates three serious problems that the brief identifies:

First, structural inaccuracy. Because differential privacy distorts data down to the block level, it becomes extremely difficult to determine accurate population counts for voting districts. A 2021 Harvard study found that differential privacy "has a tendency to transfer population across geographies in ways that artificially reduce racial and partisan heterogeneity" and "makes it impossible to accurately comply with the One Person, One Vote principle."

Second, intentional opacity. Previously, state and local governments could review census data through a process called Count Question Resolution (CQR), identify errors, and request corrections. Differential privacy essentially killed this safeguard. Local officials can't tell whether discrepancies they find are actual errors or artifacts of the algorithm. The Census Bureau can't provide clear answers without potentially revealing how the algorithm works. The 2020 Census became, in effect, the least transparent in American history.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, citizenship nullification. Even if Congress succeeds in adding a citizenship question to future censuses, a key Republican demand, differential privacy would allow the bureau to continue masking citizenship status. The algorithm scrambles characteristic data, including citizenship, making it impossible to determine voter eligibility at the block level. As the brief puts it, differential privacy serves as "the ace up the sleeve" for those wanting to hide noncitizen counting.

The policy recommendations are aggressive but necessary. The brief calls for appointing trusted personnel to the Census Bureau immediately, restarting the administrative records project to identify citizenship data from the 2020 Census, investigating the group quarters errors, and, most crucially, eliminating differential privacy entirely.

The proposal includes creating an "undetermined" category for protecting individual privacy without distorting numerical accuracy, releasing the 2020 Census data without differential privacy applied, and seeking a declaratory judgment that differential privacy violates existing law.

In August 2025, President Trump escalated calls for census reform by announcing on social media that he had directed the Commerce Department to "immediately begin work" on a new census that would exclude people in the country illegally. This announcement aligned with legislation introduced in late July by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose "Making American Elections Great Again Act" would require an immediate new census counting only U.S. citizens, followed by congressional redistricting before the 2026 midterm elections. Trump expressed support for Greene's bill, saying "It's going to get in. It's going to pass, and we're going to be very happy." Florida Governor Ron DeSantis publicly claimed that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told him "they were going to redo the count in time for 2026," arguing that Florida deserved at least two additional House seats based on the 2020 undercount. However, significant obstacles remain: census experts universally dismiss the possibility of conducting a legitimate census before 2026 as practically impossible, given that preparation typically requires a decade of work.

Nevertheless, if there's any way at all it can be done, it should be pursued.

Policy News You Need To Know

#Antitrust — A coalition of groups, ranging from Y Combinator and the News Media Alliance to conservative organizations like Rachel Bovard's Conservative Partnership Institute and the Bull Moose Project, have sent President Trump a letter Monday urging him to resist pressure from "MAGA-in-name-only lobbyists" and maintain aggressive antitrust enforcement against Google, Ticketmaster, and other alleged monopolists. The letter, which also includes signatories from the American Booksellers Association, National Grocers Association, and messaging startup Beeper (which famously sparred with Apple), represents an unusual alliance of small businesses, tech startups, traditional retailers, and populist conservatives who view concentrated corporate power as a threat to both market competition and political freedom. This push comes amid reported tensions within the administration between Gail Slater's DOJ antitrust division and more traditionally pro-business factions. The fight between new right and old right continues.

#Chyna — In a recent X thread marking the 25th anniversary of the U.S. granting permanent normal trade relations (PNTR) to China, American Compass chief economist Oren Cass compiles ten historical quotes from Clinton administration officials, economists, and business leaders that illustrate the optimistic consensus at the time, which has not borne out in practice. This is part of American Compass's funnily and sadly accurately-named "Wrong All Along" series. Proponents anticipated that PNTR would safeguard American agriculture and manufacturing from import surges and unfair pricing, foster openness to telecommunications and the internet to encourage positive internal changes in China, restrict the country's capacity for international troublemaking through economic integration, enhance regional stability by promoting gradual democratization, benefit U.S. workers overall by creating higher-wage jobs despite some low-wage competition, expose Chinese society to American values via business engagement, and deliver unequivocal economic advantages to the U.S. without destabilizing domestic labor markets or signaling tolerance for human rights issues. In reality, these expectations fell short, as China experienced rapid industrialization leading to significant U.S. manufacturing job losses and trade imbalances, while its government tightened authoritarian controls rather than liberalizing, and economic ties failed to curb geopolitical assertiveness or promote democratic reforms as envisioned.

#Trade #Tariffs — China just ramped up its export controls on seven critical rare earth elements and related tech, slapping license requirements on everything from magnets to semiconductors, in what looks like a direct provocation amidst ongoing trade talks. President Trump took to Truth Social to voice his genuine surprise, calling it a "hostile act" especially after the warmer vibes in US-China talks lately. This move threatens to choke global supply chains where Beijing already holds an 80-90% stranglehold on processing, hitting our defense and tech sectors hard right before his summit with Xi Jinping. From our vantage, it's a stark reminder that we need to double down on domestic production incentives and ally-shoring to shield American interests.

#Lawfare — Here's a funny and interesting example of blue-state lawfare falling flat: America First Legal has just exposed that Washington, Oregon, Illinois, and Arizona, states which are suing the Trump administration over Executive Order 14160, which rightly ends birthright citizenship for children of illegal immigrants, have zero evidence to back their claims of financial harm to programs like Medicaid and CHIP. Through public records requests, AFL found these states' agencies admitting they don't even track the relevant data. Oops. It's time to end this ridiculous lawfare business.

#AI — New research from Anthropic, the UK AI Security Institute, and the Alan Turing Institute reveals a concerning vulnerability in large language models. The study demonstrates that attackers need only inject approximately 250 malicious documents into training data to successfully backdoor LLMs ranging from 600M to 13B parameters. This is a surprisingly low threshold that remains constant regardless of model size or the volume of clean training data. While the researchers tested relatively benign "denial-of-service" attacks that produce gibberish outputs, the implications for more sophisticated threats like code vulnerabilities or data exfiltration are troubling. While all "panic-sounding" AI research should be taken with a massive grain of salt, especially from Anthropic, which has made AI safetyism its "brand", it is still worth keeping in mind.

#CyberpunkTerrorism — Belgian authorities thwarted a chilling assassination plot yesterday when police in Antwerp arrested three suspects for allegedly planning to murder conservative Prime Minister Bart De Wever using a homemade drone rigged with 3D-printed parts and an explosive device, as reported by Le Monde (French). Terrorism with 3D printed drones is here. What do we do next?

#Energy #BuildBuildBuild — Energy Transfer has announced a final investment decision for its $5.3 billion Desert Southwest pipeline expansion, a 516-mile extension that will transport 1.5 billion cubic feet of natural gas daily from the Permian Basin to Arizona and New Mexico markets by Q4 2029, Alexander Stevens at the institute for Energy Research reports. This represents exactly the kind of private-sector infrastructure investment we should be championing, that is to say, a massive energy project funded entirely by private capital, anchored by Arizona Public Service's commitment to purchase up to $7.3 billion in gas over 25 years to power new gas plants serving the state's exploding data center industry. The timing couldn't be better as Arizona emerges as a critical hub with 129 data centers already operating and facing 4.5 gigawatts of committed demand, primarily from AI and cloud computing operations that require reliable baseload power that intermittent renewables simply can't provide. This project addresses a critical bottleneck where years of policy-driven underinvestment have left Permian Basin pipelines near capacity despite the region producing nearly half of U.S. oil and 22% of our natural gas. Deregulation can give us a lot of energy. It still remains to be seen whether it can give us all the energy we need.

#Energy #BuildBuildBuild — Speaking of, Energy today was touting Oklo's announcement of a $1.68 billion nuclear fuel recycling facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The facility is set to create 800 jobs and become America's first privately funded facility of its kind. The California-based company, backed by AI industry leaders including OpenAI's Sam Altman, will convert nuclear waste into fuel for next-generation microreactors that are increasingly critical for powering energy-intensive data centers driving our AI revolution. This development aligns perfectly with the administration's broader "unleash nuclear energy" initiative, which prioritizes cutting regulatory red tape while fostering public-private partnerships like this collaboration between Oklo, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and the Department of Energy (which recently selected Oklo for three test reactor pilot projects). It remains to be seen whether deregulation and public-private partnerships will be enough to kickstart the notoriously investment-thirsty nuclear sector.

#Energy #DrillBabyDrill — Speaking of, in a solid win for the administration's energy dominance agenda, the Senate just passed H.J. Res. 106 by a 50-46 vote under the Congressional Review Act, scrapping a last-minute Biden-era rule that locked up 12.7 million acres of prime Interior Alaska public lands from oil, gas, and mining development. It is now headed to President Trump's desk for his signature, marking the third such rollback of restrictive Biden land policies in his second term.

#Healthcare — The Paragon Health Institute's new brief on the $50 billion Rural Health Transformation Program offers a roadmap for states to leverage this new money from the OBBBA while avoiding the pitfalls that have plagued federal rural health initiatives for decades. The analysis highlights how programs like 340B and DSH have been captured by large urban hospital systems—with over 400 urban hospitals now simultaneously classified as "rural" to access targeted funds—and warns states against repeating these mistakes with RHTP dollars. Most notably, CMS has structured the program to reward market-oriented reforms: states that eliminate Certificate of Need laws, expand scope of practice for nurse practitioners and physician assistants, and remove other anti-competitive barriers will receive substantially more funding through the competitive grant process. The brief smartly addresses the fundamental economics of rural health care, such as the uncompensated "stand-by costs" of maintaining 24/7 emergency and obstetric services for low-volume facilities, while emphasizing that solutions must be sustainable beyond the five-year funding window rather than creating new permanent entitlements. For conservative policymakers, this represents a rare opportunity where federal dollars actually incentivize deregulation and market-based reforms rather than expanding government control, though vigilance will be required to ensure funds reach actual rural providers rather than being siphoned off by politically connected urban medical centers as has happened too often in the past.

Friday Essays

"Construction Physics," by Brian Potter, is one of our favorite Substacks. Every week, Potter looks at a big engineering problem (like "How to build an aircraft engine") and breaks it down and explains it for the layman. It's invariably very interesting, especially to the kind of people who were really into Lego as boys, of which we expect there are many reading this right now. Anyway, here is the problem Potter tackles this week: "It’s unfortunately not uncommon for pedestrians to be killed by cars in the US. (…) Until around 2009, pedestrian deaths in the US had been falling (…) But since 2009, pedestrian deaths have surged." Did you know that? We didn't. Why? Potter investigates.

Speaking of the kind of people who read the PolicySphere Morning Briefing, we expect that if we say "Fatima Miracle of the Sun," some non-negligible subset of readers will know exactly what we mean, and others will have no idea. For the latter group: the Miracle of the Sun is an event in Portugal in the beginning of the 20th century during which many hundreds of people claim they saw the sun dance into the sky. The reason these hundreds of people were gathered in a field in Portugal looking at the sky is because a semiliterate peasants had claimed that the Virgin Mary had appeared to them and told them she would perform a great miracle at that time. As the rationalist blogger Scott Alexander writes, the Fatima Miracle of the Sun is the "final boss of the paranormal:" a totally inexplicable event witnessed by hundreds of people in living memory. So, what are we to make of it? Well, for 30,000 words, with painful and striking honesty, Alexander investigates.

Speaking of miracles, Ross Douthat, the conservative New York Times columnist, interviewed Hasan Piker, the infamous socialist streamer who recently tortured his dog on stream. Let's take a moment to appreciate the unique role that Douthat plays in our culture and in our discourse. Perhaps nobody else could have done such an interview, or done it quite like this. He prods Piker on his style, his numerous provocations and justifications of violence. It's a stunning document. We encourage you to read or listen or watch.

There are now essays on X dot com. Perhaps you know about the duo behind the podcast and account "Russians with Attitude." As the name suggests, they are two Russians who unapologetically support their country and its role in the war in Ukraine, while sometimes being critical of the government. They are the best outlet to read for the "intelligent Russian perspective" on the war and on world affairs. Anyhow, this isn't about that. This testimony they have relayed, from a first person perspective, is about what drone warfare is like in the Year of Our Lord 2025. It's an arresting read.

On the anniversary of October 7th, Matthew Schmitz had an interesting reflection over at Compact: "Free Palestine has replaced Black Lives Matter."