The Census is a once-a-decade count of every single person in the U.S. They send out emails to every single family asking for the information of each person in their family, but if a family doesn’t do it online, then a census worker will personally come to their house and ask them the questions face to face. If some people are miscounted, then that could affect many people, for example, if the government didn’t count some of the people from some communities, then they would get the funding wrong, and then they wouldn’t give enough, or they would give too much towards funding.