David Waddington is chief of the U.S. Census Bureau’s Social, Economic and Housing Statistics Division. The division compiles and analyzes data on the socio-economic characteristics of households, families and individuals including rates of homeownership and statistics on income, poverty and health insurance, family and fertility statistics, labor force participation, social program participation and measures of community resilience.

Waddington joined the Census Bureau in 1998 as the first chief of the Small Area Estimates Branch, where he led activities establishing the Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates program and later the Small Area Health Insurance Estimates program. In 2007, Waddington became chief of the Population Projections Branch, where he led multiple projects to produce population projections and intercensal population estimates. Waddington served as survey director of the National Survey of Fishing, Hunting and Wildlife-Associated Recreation and as a special assistant to the associate director for demographic programs.  From 2014 to 2016, Waddington served as the Census Bureau’s respondent advocate, a position in which he advocated for more than five million household survey respondents. Prior to joining the Census Bureau, Waddington spent eight years as a resource economist at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.