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How the U.S. can rebuild and improve its federal data system by combining Census, citizen, AI, and nontraditional data for stronger public policy.
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Rebuilding America’s Federal Data System for Trust and Accuracy
Aug 05, 2026
The business aphorism, “You can’t manage what you don’t measure,” applies to countries as well as corporations. The U.S. has relied since its founding on accurate Census, economic, and health and scientific data to set national policy. As an earlier Fulcrum article described, the Trump administration has put many data sources at risk, and advocates are working to save them. But they’re also asking: As we protect and rebuild the national data ecosystem, how do we make it better than it has been in the past?
I recently moderated a webinar on Meeting the Challenge of Measurement, co-sponsored by NAPA, CODE, and the Bridge Alliance, with four leaders in the field: Chris Jackson of the research firm SSRS, Beth Jarosz of the Association of Public Data Users, Francesca Perucci of Open Data Watch, and Dr. Stefaan Verhulst of the GovLab. I also interviewed former U.S. Comptroller Gene Ludwig, author of The Mismeasurement of America. Their insights, plus my organization’s recent work with USAFacts, provide three principles for moving forward.
First, the U.S. federal data system is essential and irreplaceable. There is no way to replace core federal data with some combination of research from academic, business, nonprofit, or other sources. The federal government plays two unique roles: setting standards for collecting data across the country in comparable ways and conducting very large-scale projects, such as the U.S. Census and climate, ocean, and Earth observation studies.
Second, federal statistics need improvement. An SSRS study found that about 70 percent of the public believe federal statistics are an important source of information, but just under half tend to trust those statistics. That low number may reflect increasing concern about data being politicized, but it may also show that people aren’t sure the numbers reflect their lived reality.
A growing number of experts now share that concern. Gene Ludwig has launched a nonprofit institute to develop better statistical indicators for unemployment, average wages, and inflation. In all those cases, the official statistics make life for low- and middle-income Americans look better than it is. Reanalyzing the government’s own data shows, for example, that the true unemployment rate may be closer to 25 percent than the official statistic of just over 4 percent. We need to take a fresh look at how we use the data we already collect.
Finally, we should not rely on federal data alone. While federal data collections may be the gold standard, they are often less timely, less localized, or even less relevant than other data. The ongoing decline in response rates to government surveys, along with other methodological issues, is forcing researchers to develop new methods. Approaches including community engagement, digital data analysis, and AI are fueling innovative new information sources.
One major development is the growth of citizen data, which Francesca Perucci describes as data created with meaningful community engagement, control, and some degree of ownership. In the U.S., for example, many communities have gathered local air and water quality data in the interest of environmental justice. Citizen data has become increasingly important worldwide, particularly in countries that lack the resources to develop a robust government statistical system. The UN Collaborative on Citizen Data, which Perucci co-chairs, has developed insights and guidelines that the U.S. could apply as well.
At the same time, there is growing interest in non-traditional data, which leverages the byproducts of society’s digitalization. Data from cell phones, drones, business transactions, and many other sources can be anonymized and statistically analyzed to generate new insights. Stefaan Verhulst, who has been studying this opportunity for years, described how the U.S. can use non-traditional data in a blog post prepared for our webinar. This data can provide new perspectives on economic opportunity, social connectedness, housing, employment, and many other social issues.
These new methods complement other kinds of data sources, including business data, independent survey data, and government administrative data, which continue to demonstrate their value. Combining federal and other kinds of data, as Beth Jarosz put it, can enable us to “triangulate toward the truth.” The result may be a broader, deeper, and more useful understanding of the U.S. and the world we live in.
You can watch the full video of the webinar “Meeting the Challenge of Measurement” on YouTube at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hz_TogRhigM&t=8s
Joel Gurin is president and founder of the Center for Open Data Enterprise. (CODE)
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How can the Democratic Party regain public trust? Ronald Hirsch argues for a renewed mission centered on equality, opportunity, fiscal responsibility, and American democracy.
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Can the Democratic Party Still Lead?
Aug 05, 2026
During the 20th century and for the first part of the 21st, the Democratic Party certainly led the nation in advancing the cause of equality and the ability of people to pursue their right to life, liberty, and happiness. At the same time, they led the nation by increasing its military might and advancing its power around the world to protect the human rights of others.
The American worker would likely still be toiling for low wages in industrial hell-holes were it not for the laws that Democratic-led Congresses passed to increase the rights of workers vis-a-vis employers and the rights of unions. Black individuals and other people of color would still be burdened by widespread discrimination—official and otherwise—were it not for the laws that Democratic-led Congresses passed to protect their rights as American citizens. This is not to say that we have achieved equality, but we have made much progress.
Democrats have also been firm supporters of this nation's military—not giving the defense establishment everything it wanted, but ensuring a strong military that was the best in the world. And it was Democratic Presidents and Congresses that led our entry into WWI to ensure the defeat of Germany and its allies and the freedom of Europe and much of the world. Although misguided, our entry into the Vietnam War was also in this tradition.
But Democrats seem to have lost their oomph. Ever since the end of the Obama Presidency and the rise of Donald Trump, the Democratic Party has lost its bearing. Perhaps the "Party" only ever had an amorphous bearing, and it was the leaders of the Party, the Presidents or others, who harnessed that bearing and energy and fashioned its greatness and contribution.
Since Obama, no one has risen who had the greatness in him or her to lead the Party to make America even greater than it was and its people more equal and prosperous than before. But America and Democrats cannot sit and wait for such a person to rise again from the midst of the Party.
The Party and its leaders must fashion a structure that enables them to lead even when out of power and lacking the galvanizing presence of a President. Walter Mondale said, after the defeat of John Kerry in 2004, that “we really need to work on the question of what we are for. Unless we have a vision and the arguments to match, I don’t think we’re going to truly connect with the American people.“ And this was after a presidential election—the quadrennial defining moment for the Party!
Prior to that election, I wrote the book, We Still Hold These Truths: An American Manifesto, to answer the question—what should the Party stand for—both for the Party and the American people. I used the famous words of the Declaration of Independence as a touchstone to examine all aspects of government policy and propose the direction government policy should take.
I also wrote a mission statement for the Party based on the Declaration:
“To build a country of greater opportunity where:
- each and every American has a real chance to experience the promises made in the Declaration of Independence: 'that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness' ;
- government meets its responsibility as set forth in the Declaration—‘to secure these rights’; and
- all citizens have a shared responsibility to support the government’s efforts to secure these rights and promote the public good, each according to his ability.”
These words from the Declaration of Independence are the moral philosophy, the heart, the soul of American democracy. This is, or at least until recently was, America’s common faith. Democrats must restore that faith. To further that promise of equality and opportunity with fiscal responsibility should be the clear mission of the Democratic Party.
This should be the litmus test. All the policies of the Party should flow from this mission statement, and any proposed policy that does not further the mission statement should be dropped. Government should support industry and commerce insofar as they support this mission. But if industry interests do not further this mission, if they seek power and riches for themselves without benefit to the people, the Party should not support those interests.
Too often, when proposing measures to protect the people in the areas of finance and industry regulation, Democrats have held back somewhat because of the interests of industry. And in some areas, like free trade agreements, they have capitulated to the interests of industry in spite of the valid objections of unions. And so the American worker and public have suffered, destroying their faith in the Party.
All American men, women, and children are owed the support of government policies in education, health care, civil rights, security, the economy, the environment, and taxation that provide a foundation of equal opportunity for all to pursue their right to life, liberty, and happiness. That is the American social contract.
But it is not just in the development of policies that the Party must improve. It is in communicating those policies in ways that are effective. They must also speak to the American people about the state of our country on a regular, probably weekly, basis—creating a Democratic presence. See my articles, "Where is the Democratic Party's Clarion Call?" and "The Democratic Party - Missing in Action."
The Party must become once again a real factor in the lives of the people; no more an irrelevant voice in far-away Washington.
Ronald L. Hirsch is a teacher, legal aid lawyer, survey researcher, nonprofit executive, consultant, composer, author, and volunteer. He is a graduate of Brown University and the University of Chicago Law School and the author of We Still Hold These Truths. Read more of his writing at www.PreservingAmericanValues.com
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Photo by Stephen Walker on Unsplash
The Enduring Illusion of Article the first
Aug 05, 2026
This is the third and final installment of our series on “Article the first.” Previous parts examined the history of the single inverted word that turned an intended floor into a ceiling and its impact on the amendment’s failed ratification. This concluding part outlines the path forward for enlarging the House today.
Part 3 — The Path Forward
Parts 1 and 2 traced a single inverted word from the parchment of 1789 into the state legislatures that ultimately abandoned the ratification of Article the first. That leaves the question this final part will answer: If the founders meant the House to grow with the nation, and the amendment intended to guarantee it is a dead end, what can enlarge the House now?
The number 435 is not in the Constitution. It sits in an ordinary statute — the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929 — that Congress can change at any time. The Constitution itself fixes no total; it sets only outer bounds, a minimum of one representative per state and no more than one for every thirty thousand people. Between those limits, 435 is Congress’s arbitrary creation — frozen in place for nearly a century while the population beneath it has more than tripled.
Many believe that we should revive the amendment to force the House to grow; however, because only the defective version survived, ratifying it would create three problems. First, the inverted clause would needlessly lower the ceiling to roughly 6,622 seats by creating a cap that is redundant to the one already provided by the Constitution.
Second, it would require a floor of only two hundred representatives — a floor today’s 435 already clears — thereby making the present House constitutional. And third, gravest of all, by requiring a minimum of only 200 it would provide a shield against the constitutional solution. As it turns out, that solution is nearer than two centuries of neglect would suggest, and has been hiding in plain sight.
That solution rests on a principle the country already accepts everywhere else. Since the 1960s, the Supreme Court has held, under the Fourteenth Amendment, that legislative districts must hold nearly equal populations — one person, one vote. Every state legislature obeys it and, within each state, congressional districts obey it too. Yet across state lines the House disregards it entirely. Consequently, district population sizes swing wildly from state to state: The most populous congressional district holds about 82 percent more people than the least populous, and nearly 150 million Americans suffer diluted representation for no reason other than where they happen to live.
We now arrive at an extraordinary convergence: Two independent authorities support the intended objective of Article the first: That we should now have a House of thousands. First, the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of political equality among voters should be applied across state lines, which requires a House large enough that district sizes are nearly equal. Second, the Constitution’s apportionment clause, read as the founders intended it — to apportion was to divide in exact proportion — points the same way. They all converge on a range of solutions among which, for the purposes of illustration, we have selected a House size of 6,692 Representatives, the point at which the maximum interstate disparity falls below four percent.
The mechanism beneath that may seem confusing, because representation works in inverse: The more representatives we have, the smaller each district becomes, and so the fewer people each one speaks for. A rule written as a floor — no fewer than one representative for every fifty thousand people — therefore forces the House to grow and holds the districts small; the very same words inverted into a ceiling — no more than one for every fifty thousand — cap the House and let the districts become bloated. This is the floor-and-ceiling logic that Part 1 traced, and its stakes are not abstract: A single congressional district today holds some 760,000 people, roughly fifteen times the fifty thousand the founders envisioned.
Read as the first Congress intended it — no fewer than one per fifty thousand — the first Article’s floor would today require a House of at least 6,623 members. A House that large will have nearly equalized districts: With seats so plentiful, even the least populous state’s districts fall close to the national average, and the 82-percent gap that disfigures the House at 435 simply vanishes. So the intended version did not merely permit equal representation — it guaranteed it once the nation’s population became large enough.
However, that single word substitution in the defective version inverts the intended floor into a ceiling: No more than one per fifty thousand, at most 6,622 Representatives. (The one-seat difference between the floor and ceiling is a rounding artifact explained in the longer article from which this is drawn.) Under that lower cap the House may drift closer to equality, but nothing compels that — and mere permission was never the obstacle. Congress has always been free to enlarge the House: The Constitution permits 11,036, and the 1929 cap is Congress’s own to lift. Yet it has sat at 435 for over a century. What was lacking was the will to do so, not the ability. That is the true cost of the inversion: It converted a command to grow into permission to grow, which Congress will always ignore as shown by history.
None of this waits on resurrecting the intended version of the first Article. The founders’ goal is reachable through the ordinary machinery of the republic — not by waiting for Congress to lift a cap it has clung to for a century, but by holding the House to the one-person-one-vote equality standard it alone ignores. The solution is clearly there. What is missing is only the will to demand it.
Which leaves the harder question: If the way is this clear, why is it not taken? The candid answer is that those who hold concentrated power seldom vote to dilute it. A House of 435 is more manageable — for its members, and for the special interests organized around them — than a chamber of thousands drawn close to the people it should serve. The irony is precise: because the surviving text is the defective one, ratifying it would enshrine that arrangement rather than overturn it. That is the quiet paradox beneath H.J.Res. 186, the resolution Rep. Issa introduced to sunset the first Article by year’s end. Its supporters move to retire the amendment believing it endangers the 435-seat House but, read correctly, it would protect it. Retiring a defective proposal costs the country nothing.
For citizens, the first step is simply to see the choice for what it is. The size of the people’s House is not a fixture handed down from the founding; it is a decision Congress renews by inaction every ten years. Ask candidates and Representatives where they stand on the 1929 cap. Treat the claim that only a constitutional amendment could change it as the myth it has always been. The founders left the door open three times over — through the Constitution’s apportionment command, through the equal-vote principle the courts already enforce, and through the amendment they intended.
Two hundred and thirty-seven years ago, one word was inverted, and less became more. And so the promise of more representation became a license for less. It need not remain so. Two centuries on, the founders’ solution — a House larger, closer, and genuinely the people’s — remains ours to build. It is time we built it.
Third of three parts, condensed from a fuller treatment, “The Enduring Textual Illusion of “Article the first,”” at Thirty-Thousand.org.
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Old engraved illustration of Ulysses defying the Cyclops.
Odysseus Reimagined: Nolan’s Epic Explores What Makes a True Hero
Who is a hero? More importantly: what is a hero? What attributes are universally admired, inspiring glorious stories, ballads and songs, memorials and movies, all chronicling the hero’s bold adventures?
The Odyssey, a new release written and directed by Christopher Nolan, attempts to answer that question. Based on the ancient tales The Iliad and The Odyssey, written by Homer around 800 BC, the film stars Matt Damon as Odysseus and Anne Hathaway as Penelope, his loyal wife.
Historians have puzzled over the “Homeric question,” that is, who was Homer? We know very little about him, not even when or where he was born; seven Greek cities lay claim to him as their native son. Yet, he is considered the “godfather” of national Greek culture, and his stories are among the earliest masterpieces of literature.
Homer is sometimes romanticized as a blind poet who wandered from town to town reciting his stories. But he, who could express so poignantly the tribulations of Odysseus, was not blind to human nature. He keenly wrote of the attributes as well as the paltriness in his characters and the flaws of his great hero, Odysseus.
The Iliad is the story of the final years of the Trojan War, sparked when Helen, the beautiful wife of Sparta’s King Menelaus, was kidnapped by Paris of Troy. Because the kings had initiated a pact to defend one another, Odysseus was drawn into the fray.
After spending ten years fighting the Trojan War and finally achieving victory, The Odyssey tells of Odysseus’s struggle to return to his kingdom, Ithaca. On his way home, he encounters many dangers and delays. He is pursued by the sea-god Poseidon, must surmount Circe’s spell, and overcome the seductive charms of the enchantress Calypso, and his journey takes him another ten years.
Odysseus’s desires and struggles are universal: his longing for home, yearning for an end to his troubles, for rest after a long and difficult journey. His difficulties reflect the immemorial questions of what it means to be loyal, to belong, what it means “to be” at all. Despite his hubris, which manifests in his propensity to court catastrophe without regard for consequences, Odysseus is an authentic hero, noble and admirable, brave and dedicated.
According to the Greek ideal, a true hero must possess physical excellence and moral virtue. He must, as well, embrace his civic duty. Achieving such status requires “paideia,” a good education; “sophrosyne,” moderation in maintaining physical and emotional balance; and “arete,” an allegiance to the state.
Fictional or real, heroes’ deeds resonate through the centuries and shine a light on what is best in humanity, what matters, what will live on despite our mortality.
Is our digital age really so different from Homer’s Bronze Age? Physical beauty is still adulated, as it was then with Helen of Troy, “the face that launched a thousand ships.” (Marlowe) Power is still king, and wealth is still power.
The years of the Trojan War were harsh and violent. But were they more brutal than the times we live in? Although millenniums have passed and we now have different battlefields, Palestine, Ukraine, Iran, etc., the ravages and the wages of war remain the same: death and suffering. Humanity’s currency is the same, and so, too, is our quest for heroes.
Social scientists claim that after three generations most people are forgotten by even their direct progeny, and after four, remembered only by historical records. So, what then does last? What makes a difference? What is truly beautiful and worthwhile in life?
The universal themes embodied and emboldened by our heroes throughout the ages, the faithfulness of their hearts and the courage of their deeds, these last.
The essential qualities of a hero are manifested in Homer’s Odysseus. Steadfast integrity: “Hateful to me as the gates of Hades is that man who hides one thing in his heart and speaks another.” His deep compassion: “Yet, taught by time, my heart has learned to glow for others’ good, and to melt at others’ woes.” (Both quotes from The Odyssey.)
Nolan’s movie may have created a more virtuous hero than Homer’s works, but the core of the nearly 3,000-year-old-story is intact and as crucially relevant today as it was then. It is the stuff of life: trauma, survival, relationships with others, finding oneself, deciding what is right, choosing a path forward, sometimes, ultimately leading to the honing of a hero.
Just as Odysseus braved storms, temptations, and trials in search of home, we too face a modern sea of civic turbulence, polarization, mistrust, and the fraying of our shared story.
As we live, we too will write our defining stories. How then might we become modern heroes?
By instigating the third Greek ideal of “arete”; embracing our civic duty. By becoming citizens who are open to reflection and debate, who are willing to act with purpose for the betterment of our nation.
In this journey, the work of renewing our democracy can be its own Odyssey, a voyage calling for integrity, courage, and steadfast commitment. Not to return home as Odysseus so desired, but to preserve our home, for the grand and worthwhile purpose of working toward an ever-better future for our country.
With others, we can shape the next chapter of our nation’s collective story.
Amy Lockard is an Iowa resident who regularly contributes to regional newspapers and periodicals. She is working on the second of a four-book fictional series based on Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice."