  McCartan et al. (2023) call for "making differential privacy work for census
data users." This commentary explains why the 2020 Census Noisy Measurement
Files (NMFs) are not the best focus for that plea. The August 2021 letter from
62 prominent researchers asking for production of the direct output of the
differential privacy system deployed for the 2020 Census signaled the
engagement of the scholarly community in the design of decennial census data
products. NMFs, the raw statistics produced by the 2020 Census Disclosure
Avoidance System before any post-processing, are one component of that
design-the query strategy output. The more important component is the query
workload output-the statistics released to the public. Optimizing the query
workload-the Redistricting Data (P.L. 94-171) Summary File, specifically-could
allow the privacy-loss budget to be more effectively managed. There could be
fewer noisy measurements, no post-processing bias, and direct estimates of the
uncertainty from disclosure avoidance for each published statistic.
