Mr. Pickering says he suspects that the F.B.I. requested the mail cover to monitor his mail because a former associate said the bureau had called with questions about him.
If you're associated with the Bureau, you can get research out quickly in a place everyone will see, whereas if you aren't in the magic circle, getting noticed can be much harder.
"That's not an unusual or atypical swing," said Brent R. Moulton, the bureau's associate director for national economic accounts.
Mr. Date is just filling in, originally hired as the bureau's associate director, until the Senate confirms a leader.
Under the heading "most significant source of postsecondary education or training," the bureau wrote "associate degree" for registered nurses.
A University of Michigan sociologist and a leading authority on survey methodology, Mr. Groves served as the bureau's associate director from 1990 to 1992.
"All I'm saying is I'm not shocked at the level of appeals," Mr. Waite, the bureau's associate director for the decennial census, said of the official challenges filed with the bureau concerning prison and other institutional populations.
Brent R. Moulton, the bureau's associate director for national economic accounts, said the new figures reflected preliminary data from the Internal Revenue Service for 2006, and revised figures for 2005.
He served as associate director of the bureau in the 1990s, when President Bill Clinton battled with Republican lawmakers in an effort to adopt statistical sampling as a way to correct for counting errors.
Before being nominated, Groves served as director of the University of Michigan's Survey Research Center and before that served as the "Bureau's associate director of statistical design from 1990 to 1992".
