In the past two decades media, academic, and policy circles in Egypt have seen a rather public debate over official statistics, a departure for what is historically a very secretive sector. Meanwhile, issues of reform and “capacity building” in official statistics have assumed an unprecedented prominence at major international organizations (e.g. World Bank, IMF, UN), both in general and in their relations with Egypt. My paper examines official statistics in Egypt, focusing on the last two decades. I argue that contemporary Egyptian debates over statistical policy are shaped by historical patterns of statebuilding in Egypt and cannot be reduced to policy prescriptions presented by international organizations. I first trace the history of Egyptian official statistics since the 1950s, arguing that major economic policy shifts have led to new parallel bureaucracies producing official statistics. Thus the nominally official statistical agency CAPMAS shares the field with several other data-producing bureaucracies in a de-facto decentralized system, contrary to CAPMAS’s founding mandate in 1964 to be the exclusive data authority in Egypt. Different agencies often release contradictory figures for the same indicators, further fueling public debate. I then turn to the two most prominent contemporary statistical agencies in Egypt, namely CAPMAS and the more recently founded IDSC, housed in the Cabinet presidency office. Both CAPMAS and IDSC have orchestrated competing projects to reform the statistical sector under their own auspices, which I chart in detail. Moreover, I argue that Egypt’s various statistical agencies have each deployed resources from international organizations to bolster their own position in this domestic debate, resulting in competing reform initiatives rather than the integration of the statistical sector as international organizations intend. My work shows that statebuilding patterns and inter-bureaucratic conflict are critical to understanding the trajectory of Egyptian official statistics. I conclude with a look to the post-Mubarak future, expecting the above dynamics to continue and even to intensify as Egypt negotiates with the IMF and other international organizations, which will likely put pressure on Egypt for statistical reform. My research also raises methodological and epistemological questions by reading qualitiative and area-specific forms of knowledge against the universalizing assumptions of the international template for globally comparable data. The argument is developed with evidence gathered over a year of fieldwork in Egypt including interviews with officials and experts, and print sources including the Egyptian National Archives, Egyptian newspaper archives, policy documents, official publications, and Egyptian academic literature.