This paper traces the development of the primary official statistical institutions in Egypt between 1952 and the present. While an emerging literature on the political dimensions of statistical knowledge emphasizes the changing place of expertise, diffusion of statistical norms, and rise of Foucauldian governmentality, I argue instead that attention to the organizational context of statistical policy in Egypt reveals the pivotal role that statebuilding struggles related to inter-state conflict and regime consolidation have played in shaping the Egyptian statistical sector. Legacies of these historical struggles inform the scope and extent of the authority of the central statistical agency CAPMAS and are, I argue, still shaping the debate over statistical reform today. I chart successive shifts in Egypt’s political-economic orientation and accompanying reorganizations of the official statistical agencies and policies. In the 1950s and 1960s, each phase in the fitful rise of macroeconomic planning and the ascendancy of the public sector brought new waves of institutional and policy innovation in statistics, culminating in the 1964 founding of the national statistical agency CAPMAS, which enjoys an exclusive mandate over statistics in the country. However the trajectory of the statistical agency diverged from that of the rest of the planning apparatus; while the latter’s power quickly waned the dynamics of statistical reform brought the former closer to the ruling power center in the military. Whereas the Nasserist period featured successive reforms of a single central agency, economic re-orientation and neoliberalism under Sadat and Mubarak were marked by institutional proliferation in official statistics, i.e., the data needs of market-oriented economic policies were addressed by creating new parallel statistical agencies as much as by reforming CAPMAS’s sweeping authority. While these new agencies drew upon the same discourses of statistical expertise as CAPMAS, they ultimately came to contest the latter’s monopoly, which has been -- and remains -- the key question concerning statistical reform in Egypt. A concluding look at the post-2011 statistical sector argues that this period has seen a strengthening of CAPMAS vis-à-vis its main bureaucratic rivals. On a theoretical level, this account suggests that a focus on struggles over statebuilding, and their bureaucratic legacies, can capture the historical development and contemporary dynamics of reform in official statistics more readily than approaches emphasizing competing forms of expertise or diffusion of technocratic norms. Sources include interviews with Egyptian officials and experts, official publications, policy documents, and media archives, in Arabic and other languages.