William G. Barron Jr.

William G. Barron, Jr., is a senior client executive at Northrop Grumman Corporation. Prior to joining Northrop Grumman, Barron was a visiting lecturer in the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University for the spring 2005 semester. Before returning to Princeton, Barron was senior vice president for economic studies at the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago. Barron spent the 2003–2004 and 2002–2003 academic years at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University, where he was the Frederick H. Schultz Class of 1951 Professor of International Economic Policy with the rank of Lecturer of Public and International Affairs, and later the John L. Weinberg/Goldman Sachs and Company Visiting Professor and Lecturer in Public and International Affairs. Before teaching at Princeton, Barron was acting director, deputy director, and chief operating officer of the U.S. Census Bureau. He joined the Census Bureau in April 1999. Prior to becoming a senior career civil servant at the U.S. Census Bureau, Barron served with distinction in top management posts at the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) for nearly 30 years before moving to the Commerce Department in August 1998 as the deputy undersecretary of the Economics and Statistics Administration. He has testified before Congress on a wide range of topics covering management and budgetary matters, as well as sensitive economic and statistical issues such as unemployment and the cost of living. Barron is the recipient of multiple Presidential Rank Awards and a gold medal from the secretary of commerce. He is the only career official to serve as the deputy and acting head of the federal government’s two largest statistical agencies—the BLS and the Census Bureau.