There is one adverb in the new definition and it is doing all the work.

On September 10 the Federal Register carried a proposed rule from the Census Bureau that would rewrite what "usual residence" means. Usual residence is the answer to a plain question, the one the count has been built on since 1790: where do you actually live? The proposed § 60.2(a) answers it this way. A person's usual residence "is the residence at which they have lawfully spent the greatest number of days during the census enumeration period."

Lawfully. Not the days you spent. The days you lawfully spent.

Nothing in this is law. It is a proposal, comments close October 13, and every sentence below is about a document that asks to become a rule and has not become one. But you can read it right now, it is eight pages long, and everything below comes off those pages.

The Receipt

The document is Decennial Census of the Population of Americans; Proposed Residence Criteria and Proposed Regulations for Demographic Questions. Read that title twice. The census counts the population of the United States; this proposal is titled the population of Americans.

It was filed by the Census Bureau on September 9 and published September 10, under RIN 0607-AA75 and Docket No. 260903-0005. Comments close October 13, 2026, which is thirty-three days. It is signed at the bottom, dated September 8, by Howard Lutnick, Secretary of Commerce.

It would create two entirely new parts of the Code of Federal Regulations, neither of which exists today. Part 60 is titled "Residence Criteria for the Decennial Census of the American Population." Part 70 is titled "Restrictions on the Inclusion of Certain Demographic Questions in the Decennial Census Operation." One decides who gets counted. The other decides what the count is allowed to ask you.

The word that does the work

Proposed § 60.2 is three short paragraphs and you should read all three.

Paragraph (a) is the definition, and after the "lawfully" sentence it adds a second one: a person's usual residence "should be consistent with, and evidenced by, their tax records (e.g., tax returns, W-2 forms)."

Paragraph (b) sets the unit of measure. A day counts, it says, where a person "spent at least one hour physically and lawfully present there that day," and the same day can belong to more than one residence. So the count is a tally of hours, and the hours have to be lawful ones.

Paragraph (c) sets the window. "The census enumeration period runs from January 3 to April 1 during decennial census years." The preamble explains the choice: January 3 is where a congressional term starts in odd-numbered years under the Twentieth Amendment, and April 1 is the census reference date in statute. Just under three months, and the days inside that window are what the rule proposes to weigh.

This piece is going to quote § 60.2(a) and then stop, because the obvious question is not answered in the document. If your usual residence must be evidenced by your tax records, what happens to the person who files no return? The nearest the rule comes is an endnote saying reliance on tax-return information "will necessarily be situation dependent," and that the Bureau will weigh "each particular data element's purpose, timing, and reliability." That is the whole answer the text gives. If you want more than that, the comment docket is where you ask for it.

Two sentences at § 60.4

Proposed § 60.4 is where the rewriting lands, and it is two entries long.

Under (a), a foreign citizen who is also either a U.S. citizen or a lawful permanent resident gets counted at their usual residence, under the § 60.2 definition above. Under (b), here is the whole text: "All other citizens of foreign countries as of April 1 of a decennial census year. Not counted for apportionment."

That is the operative provision of the entire proposal, and the whole of it fits in two short sentences.

Read the scope of it carefully, in both directions. It is a proposed exclusion from the apportionment count specifically, and an endnote says the Bureau "maintains and publishes statistics separate from those for apportionment, and the Census Bureau expects to continue doing so in the future." It is also not limited to people here unlawfully. The preamble says outright which line it is drawing: the Bureau proposes to include lawful permanent residents "while excluding from the apportionment base illegal aliens and aliens whose legal status is less durable and indefinite in length than lawful permanent resident status."

That second clause is a category, not a list, and the rule never fills it in. It does not name a single status. It does not use the phrase "Temporary Protected Status" anywhere in its eight pages, and if you read that clause as reaching people who hold it, understand that you are reading a description, which is this desk's reading and not the rule's words. The rule itself admits the line is unsettled. It says: "The Census Bureau invites comments on whether other forms of legal status are materially similar to lawful permanent resident status."

You will not get a number here for how many people § 60.4(b) would move out of the apportionment base, or which states would gain or lose a seat. There is no such estimate in this desk's hands, the rule does not print one, and the figures circulating on that question come from modeling nobody here has read. A show that runs on receipts does not hand you somebody else's model and call it a receipt.

While you are in Part 60, two other criteria are worth knowing. Proposed § 60.3 counts a dependent at a separate usual residence if they have "a consistent usual residence separate from their provider(s)," and otherwise at the provider's residence where they spend the most days. And proposed § 60.9 reads, in full: "Persons confined at correctional or detention facilities, including juvenile facilities. Counted at the facility." No "lawfully" in either sentence, no tax records, and no cross-reference back to § 60.2 for the definition. Within proposed Part 60 that adverb is printed in § 60.2 alone, in paragraphs (a) and (b). And § 60.9 is not the only entry that places a person by where they are held: proposed § 60.6(b) reads "U.S. military personnel in military disciplinary barracks and jails in the United States on Census Day. Counted at the facility."

The other half: what the count is not allowed to ask

Part 70 is the other proposal, and the Bureau is explicit that the two stand or fall separately.

Proposed § 70.2(a): "No question about race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation shall appear on the short form decennial census questionnaire or any questionnaire used for the enumeration of the population." Questions about "biological sex, date of birth, and household relationships" may still be asked, "for the sake of facilitating data verification." The abstract describes counting for apportionment based on usual residence as a process that "factors in an element of allegiance but otherwise should be colorblind and should not be distorted in any way by questions about immaterial personal characteristics, such as race."

Two more paragraphs matter and almost nobody will quote them. Proposed § 70.2(c): "With the exception of questions about biological sex, date of birth, and household relationships, no person shall be obligated to furnish a response to any demographic question as part of the decennial census." That is a real change to a real obligation: the preamble notes that under 13 U.S.C. 221 a respondent is legally required "to answer, to the best of [their] knowledge, any of the questions . . . submitted to [them] in connection with any census," and that failing to do so "constitutes a federal crime." And proposed § 70.2(d) says questions about the residence criteria are not demographic questions "subject to the restrictions of this part." That means the questions Part 70 restricts and the questions Part 60 would need are two different sets.

Then proposed § 70.3(b), which is the one to sit with: the Bureau "shall not disclose or publish any individual demographic data if such disclosure or publication necessitates introducing uncertainty into the population count data, at either the national or the state level."

Proposed § 70.4 would leave the American Community Survey alone, expressly, along with any other survey not used for the enumeration.

Why it costs you

Here is the part that reaches past immigration status and into your own county.

The rule tells you itself what this data is for. It notes that a 1975 statute obliges the Secretary of Commerce to hand each participating State the final population tabulations it uses to draw its districts. It cites Louisiana v. Callais, decided in 2026, as a case "clarifying legal standards under the Voting Rights Act of 1965." And it says that in 2020, publishing demographic data led the Bureau to introduce "deliberate randomness and uncertainty to, among other data, population counts below the state level, which are meant to be used for (re)districting."

Now set the two proposed sections beside each other. Proposed § 70.2(a) would take the race question off the count. Proposed § 70.3(b) would then bar publishing demographic data where doing so requires introducing exactly that uncertainty, and the preamble explains that disclosure-avoidance techniques "effectively introduce uncertainty into the overall data."

Remove the question, then restrict the release of what is left. Whatever else that is, it is not neutral about who can walk into a courtroom with a table in their hand.

And apportionment is not an abstraction with somebody else's name on it. The rule says what the count is for in its own first line of argument: "The sole Constitutional purpose of the decennial census is to apportion the seats in the U.S. House of Representatives among the States." A rule about who is inside that count is a rule about how many members of Congress your state sends.

How the machine works

The rule does not just propose a status test. It proposes a way to run one, and that is the passage worth reading twice.

The Bureau writes that it is "considering utilizing its enormously broad access to administrative records to determine an individual's legal status." Then it inventories that access in one sentence: "The Census Bureau has access to a vast and expanding universe of records and information that includes, but is not limited to, Department of Treasury records; Department of Health and Human Services records; Department of Homeland Security records; Department of State records; Department of War records; U.S. Postal Service records; certain state, local, and tribal records; and third-party commercial data." It says its holdings are "nearly exhaustive of the civilian Federal government's holdings." It says it is "continually searching for new sources of information," that it has "substantially more information than it did when it conducted the 2020 Census," and that its data linkage infrastructure is one "that has only improved in recent years."

Note the phrase "Department of War," which appears six times in this document, including in the criteria that say whose administrative data would be used to place military personnel. The proposal is not shy about the machinery.

And it leaves a door open that the two proposed parts do not close. The Bureau "could, in addition, include a question about legal status on the short-form decennial census questionnaire," and it "welcomes comments on the inclusion of a legal-status question." So one proposal would bar the questionnaire from asking your race, while the preamble of the same document asks the public whether the questionnaire should start asking your legal status.

The legal argument underneath all of it is old on purpose. The preamble builds "inhabitant" out of a 1760 Vattel treatise defining inhabitants as "strangers, who are permitted to settle and stay in the country," a 1784 letter from John Adams, an 1818 circuit opinion, an 1852 New Jersey case and an 1867 constitutional manual, with one modern case in the stack, Wesberry v. Sanders in 1964, quoted for the proposition that delegates meant "the number of the State's inhabitants."

Watch the grammar the Bureau uses when it does this. The argument is introduced in the third person, as what "proponents of this legal argument" understand and what follows "so the legal argument goes." Of the pending challenges it cites, the notice says it "incorporates for consideration, without necessarily endorsing, the arguments raised in those challenges." And then the Bureau steps in and adopts it anyway: it "finds merit in the interpretive argument outlined above and has preliminarily determined that, under the best reading of the Constitutional mandate, illegal aliens (among others) should not be included in the apportionment count, as they are not true inhabitants, members of the body politic, or persons with a 'usual residence' in the United States due to their lack of a sufficient tie and allegiance to the United States."

Allegiance. That is the word the rule uses, and it is the test it proposes to build.

The document also tells you who has been pushing. It cites the "Memorandum of July 21, 2020, Excluding Illegal Aliens From the Apportionment Base Following the 2020 Census" at 85 FR 44679, and five bills by name: the Equal Representation Act, the COUNT Act, the Correct the Count Act, the Count Only Citizens Act, and the No Representation Without Legal Immigration Act. This desk read the rule, not those documents, and will not tell you what any of them says. And a footnote lists the litigation, including a petition the State of Florida filed with the agency, which endnote 4 gives as "Petition for Rulemaking to the Census Bureau, U.S. Department of Commerce" and dates April 15, 2026. That petition is not opened here either. What is on the record is that Florida asked, in writing, more than a year before this proposal, and the proposal cites it.

The strongest version of the other side

State it at full strength, because it is a real argument and the show does not sell you a clean ending.

The census has exactly one constitutional job, apportioning the House, and everything piled on top of it is accretion. The Bureau quotes a federal appeals court making that point in 1981: "Although the census is the delight of statisticians and sociologists and serves as a convenient measuring stick for the dispensing of federal funds, it was not created for these purposes." Every extra question costs response rate, and the Bureau says so plainly, that "in general, the more questions that are included on the decennial census questionnaire, the lower the overall response rate." Every extra published statistic costs privacy, which is not a talking point but a statutory obligation under 13 U.S.C. 9. A shorter form should get more people to answer, and more people answering is a better count. The demographic questions do not vanish from American life; proposed § 70.4 keeps them on the American Community Survey, which is where the Bureau says they can go. And the residence criteria have moved before, more than once, which the rule documents at length.

That is a coherent case and a person can hold it in good faith.

Now the catch. Whether the American Community Survey can carry the same weight as the count is a question this rule does not answer and neither will this piece. But there are two things the Bureau wrote itself that sit badly next to the tidy version. The first is that a proposal about apportioning seats in Congress among the States contains this sentence: "This proposed rule does not have federalism implications because it would not have substantial direct effects on the States, on the relationship between the national government and the States, or on the distribution of power and responsibilities among the various levels of government." The second is next to it, in the small-business certification: "No other public or private entity would be directly regulated."

Congressional seats are distributed among the States. If moving people into and out of that distribution has no substantial direct effect on the States, then somebody should explain what the paperwork is for.

What you can actually do

The comment window is the whole point of a proposed rule, and it closes October 13, 2026.

Comments go through the federal e-rulemaking portal at regulations.gov under FDMS Docket number USBC-2026-0628, or by mail to the address printed in the notice. Read the fine print before you type: the notice says that personal identifying information submitted voluntarily "will be posted and publicly accessible," and that the Bureau "will accept anonymous comments (enter 'N/A' in the required fields if you wish to remain anonymous)."

If you want your comment to land where the agency has actually asked for help, it has told you where the gaps are. It invited comment on "whether other forms of legal status are materially similar to lawful permanent resident status," which is the unfilled category in § 60.4(b). It invited comment on adding a legal-status question to the short form. It invited comment on the residence criteria as a whole and on the demographic-question restrictions as a whole. Four open doors, named by the agency, in its own document.

Then read the rule yourself. It is eight pages and the regulatory text at the back is the short part of it. You do not need anybody's summary, including this one.

The so-what

The last section of each proposed part is a severability clause, and each preamble carries a matching one that reaches across to the other proposal. If a court stays part of this, the rest keeps running. That is a document built by people who expect to be sued and intend to survive it in pieces.

Which is the real measure of what today was. A proposed rule is not a law, a comment period is not a vote, and the two questions worth holding are these. If usual residence has to be lawful, the count stops being a question about where you sleep and starts being a question about your paperwork. And if the count cannot ask about race and cannot publish what would blur the total, then the number gets cleaner and the proof gets harder, at the same time, by design.

Thirty-three days. The docket is open, it is free, and it takes an afternoon.

Come back for the rest

We do this every week: the official framing on top, the document underneath it, and every number walked back to the page it came off of. Pull up a chair, pour something cold, and let us send you the receipts before the next quiet rewrite clears the Federal Register. Subscribe to The Long Pour, the free newsletter where the week's small thefts and the one big one land in your inbox together.

Y'all come back, now.

The Receipts

This piece stands on one document and its own catalog record, both opened and saved on September 10, 2026. Everything above is traced to them.