Editor's Roundup
USDA people in the news

Joe Reilly was selected as the deputy administrator for field operations in the National Agricultural Statistics Service. He succeeded Fred Barrett, who served in that position from April 1995 until he retired in May 1999, following nearly 36 years of service with NASS. Ron Bosecker, [then] director of the agency’s Research Division, served as acting deputy administrator for field operations in the interim, until he was selected as NASS’s administrator in December 1999.

From February 1997 until his selection, Reilly served as director of NASS’s Census Division. In that position he was responsible for conducting the 1997 Census of Agriculture--which was the first Census of Agriculture in history that was conducted by USDA, not the U.S. Bureau of the Census. He was assistant director of the Census Bureau’s Agriculture Division from 1993- 97, where he directed the majority of the operations of the 1992 Census of Agriculture--which, by law, is conducted every five years. From 1991-93 he served as chief of the Census Bureau’s Automation and Implementation Branch for Field Operations, where he was responsible for introducing computer-assisted interviewing for the Census Bureau’s monthly labor force survey.

Reilly worked as a program manager in the Census Bureau’s headquarters office in Washington, DC, from 1987-91, where he was responsible for the procurement and installation of the automated systems at all of the Census Bureau’s 460 field offices involved in conducting the 1990 Decennial U.S. Population Census. He began his career with the Census Bureau in 1975 as a survey statistician in the agency’s regional office in Atlanta.

A native of Tamaqua, Pa., where he grew up on a family farm which raised dairy cows, chickens, and corn, Reilly holds a B.S. degree in statistics and marketing from Pennsylvania State University.