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15th letter of the former Chairman, the purchase of printing presses, the requirement that we are going to go ahead regardless of what the Executive Branch has said. And in response briefly to the gentleman from Maryland, with his example of the authorizing committee saying, No, don't go ahead, I think we have a slightly different situation here.

I am sitting here as the Chairman of the authorizing committee saying, Go ahead. The President has said, Go ahead. The Vice President has said, Go ahead. The leadership, the Speaker, on both sides of the House and Senate, have said, Go ahead. I think this is a slightly different circumstance.

Clearly there are Members of both the House and the Senate who are going to tell you, Don't go ahead. But frankly, this is one of those entities that we can study forever. And clearly decisions were made in the early 1990s that probably were not the best decisions. Decisions are being made in conference committees on a yearly basis which lock in and expand powers, which if we took a step back and reexamined them probably would not have been approved.

And so I will tell you, Mr. Chairman, that if you folks have the ability to begin the process of unwinding this structure, I think you ought to look very carefully, because if you begin the process of unwinding, that will only hasten and intensify the need for rethinking the structure.

If you don't move, folks who don't want change will have some reason for never, ever sitting down and discussing how we are going to change it. The old Willie Sutton argument, Why did he go to banks, because that was where the money is. How do you get change? Focus on the money. If you don't get the money, you will force a change, and that may not be all bad.

INFORMATION DISSEMINATION

Mr. HOYER. Mr. Chairman, I have got to go, because Secretary Reich is testifying before a committee on which I serve.

I don't know whether GPO can overcome the vicious attack that they do what the Congress asks them to do. But I would expect if they didn't do what Congress asked them to do, they would have an equally vigorous group that would stand up and say that is not the right thing.

The fact of the matter is, in terms of the dissemination of information, I understand what the President and Vice President have said. This is a unique operation. And the leadership of the Senate and the House now has not always been over the last 35, 50 days, I guess, as supportive of the President and Vice President, I have noticed, as they seem to be today.

The fact of the matter is, I think they would be very concerned if the creation and dissemination of information were totally within the executive department's realm at this point in time. In a democracy, it is not so bad to have the representative of the people-they may be wrong, the Congress and the Senate, the House and the Senate may be wrong from time to time, and we ought to change our requests. But what we ought not, it seems to me, to do is say in a democracy that the people's representatives. In asking for information, should have the executive department say, No, you are

wrong, we are not going to give that information to you or to the American public. It seems to me that is a relatively perverse result of reforms.

Mr. PACKARD. The intent of my question was not to put the pressure on the Government Printing Office; it was to see if there is a way that we can control our requests.

Mr. HOYER. I think it is a good question.

Mr. PACKARD. And frankly we will have to make some significant policy decisions as we move into the electronic age. One of the questions that will come up later, after you leave, perhaps, is, as we move into the electronic age and now are starting to provide access, on-line access to much of the information we are sending out in printed material now, should that eliminate a good deal of the printed material, or are we going to duplicate and have a two-track system of providing information which obviously would be much more expensive to continue printing at the level we are printing, and then start to put on line on our electronic equipment the same information.

If we can't reduce the hard copy as we move toward the electronic age, then we may be missing the boat in terms of setting policy.

Mr. HOYER. I think you make a good point. My own view, and the experts with whom I have talked believe that there will be hard-copy requirements for a long period of time to come, for obvious reasons. That is not to say that your premise isn't correct, that technology is changing the way we do business, and we ought to think in that framework, not in an old framework. I think you are correct.

And I again would urge you to visit the Government Printing Office which I think needs to be renamed, and I am going to think about a good name for it, because they do much more, as Mr. Thomas has said, than what we conjure up as printing. They do much more in terms of the modern dissemination and creation of information that can be accessed by the public.

Mr. PACKARD. You mentioned

Mr. THOMAS. Mr. Chairman, I think the record really needs to be clear. No one has ever advocated putting the printing capabilities totally in the Executive Branch. That was suggested by the gentleman from Maryland as an alternative. That simply is not the

case.

If I had a choice of changing the name of the Government Printing Office and retaining all its functions, or keeping the name Government Printing Office and logically creating a structure which meets the needs of the 21st Century, then clearly the latter would be my choice. A name change is not the problem.

The fundamental problem is a monolithic structure which controls not just the Legislative but the Executive Branch, the dissemination of information to the public, not just the what but the how. And clearly that needs to be rethought.

But I want the record to be clear. No one has advocated that if we make a change in the Government Printing Office, that we simply ship it off to the Executive Branch. The Superintendent of Documents' function, which has changed over time historically, needs to be rethought. The needs of the Legislative Branch need to be

rethought. Just as we are talking about the revolutionary idea of combining the Capitol Police on the House and Senate side to create a uniform Capitol Police force, I think the printing needs of the House and the Senate need to be reexamined and maybe we can save some money there.

The number of hard copies that are blindly produced because someone told them to produce it sometime in the past needs to be revisited. The Executive Branch should be listened to in terms of what they believe their needs are. Take that into consideration rather than having, once again, the Government Printing Office controlled by the Joint Committee on Printing, dictate to the point of going to court to hang onto the monolithic structure of the 19th century.

GPO FINANCES AND BUDGET

Mr. PACKARD. We appropriate $90 million for Congressional Printing, a little over $32 million for the Superintendent of Documents, yet the GPO has a budget somewhere around $800 to $900 million. Most of this is revenue generated by contracting out a lot of Executive Branch printing.

So when we deal with a finite budget, they deal with a huge budget in a working capital business fund. Is that a good system? Mr. THOMAS. Well, I am trying to analyze it. When you have got 4,000-plus employees, and once again, you run a monolithic system that tries to control the printing of not only the Legislative Branch, not only the Executive Branch, but the Department of Defense and all other areas, not just the classic offset, web press, but moving into the new technology of duplication and the rest, and covets the monopoly, I have got to believe that it is time to rethink what they do and how they do it. And especially if they are losing money every year in doing it and arguing they have to suck more into the black hole to try to break even, that they can't let anybody else make decisions on their own because that may in fact then push them further in the red.

That is a classic profile that needs fundamental rethinking, not support and justification.

Mr. PACKARD. Thank you.

GPO REPORT ON GPO/DOD CAMPARISON OF PRINTING COSTS

I have read through the GAO report on comparing DOD printing costs with that of the Government Printing Office. Have you seen that report and reviewed it?

Mr. THOMAS. I have seen it and very briefly reviewed it, but I have not read it.

Mr. PACKARD. Have you drawn any conclusions?

Mr. THOMAS. I am relying on staff recommendations as we go through, but I will tell you in a very short time I will have it digested and will have an opinion.

Mr. PACKARD. Then I will reserve my questions on that.

Although it is understandable that GPO wants to control all the reproduction workload, I suspect that this may be moving against the tide, GAO in the report has found that agency in-house or contract duplicating is frequently cheaper than going through the Gov

ernment Printing Office where they add an overhead charge as it goes out to contract.

Many of the agencies have their own desktop equipment facilities. Is it your belief that this subject needs to be reviewed? And if so, do you plan to look at it, at the section that deals with that? Mr. THOMAS. Mr. Chairman, it is amazing what people can do with cost and numbers in terms of justifying their existence. This is clearly one of the areas you want to focus on, because it is very hard for me to believe that the 19th century concept of a monolithic contracting out structure which has an in-house support structure that has to constantly be fed, ultimately is cheaper than the ability now to do in-house desktop. And when we say "desktop," sometimes they are enormous desk tops given the ability to publish and what they can publish, and the duplicating abilities we have today, in which there is direct contracting out, with a clear oversight structure to make sure it is reasonable, couldn't in many instances produce a cheaper cost product.

But more fundamental than that is the requirement that we stay in the box of 19th century printing and contracting out. When you have a large labor force, you tend to focus on labor-intensive activities. It just seems to me that we have got to break away from this, and that the fastest and cheapest way to do it is to begin to get other people into play who don't have that heavy workload on board and have to feed it. That I think would produce the cheapest cost in the long run.

In addition to that, I want to figure out the way in which we can as rapidly as possible get away from the hard copies that we currently produce. There is no question there will be a need for hard copies. How many is the question.

And it makes no sense at all to have truckloads of bound Congressional Records weighing X number of pounds hauled down and mailed out to depository libraries when through CD-ROM and other technology, you can not only make retrieval faster and more efficient, but shipping and storage costs are far cheaper.

And the only argument I have heard against it is we don't know how long the CD-ROM technology will last in terms of its recorded form. But that seems to me grasping at straws in terms of not wanting to replace the system that is there.

I just say I am sorry that some decisions about purchasing equipment and other decisions were made in the early 1990s, and that frankly this probably should have been rethought in the mid-1980s. There was an attempt to begin that process but it was stymied. I hope it isn't stymied again this time.

That is why I would underscore, Mr. Chairman, if the decision on budgetary matters was made, it will certainly speed up the proc

ess.

Mr. HOYER. Mr. Chairman, if I might, clearly your question is an excellent one, and my own view is, the GPO is going to have to stand or fall or be remodeled on the basis of what the facts show.

I have not read the GAO report, but I am informed by staff that their conclusion is, although they can't give a figure on it, that in fact GPO does it cheaper than DOD. That may not be correct. But that is what my staff advises me.

You are going to hear from Mr. DiMario, and I have some suspicion as to why that is the case in terms of the equipment that DOD has purchased, about 70 to 80 times the number that GPO has in terms of some technology to produce its documentation.

But in any event, I think your basic premise is correct. If we can't do it cheaper than GPO, we ought not to be doing it there. Mr. PACKARD. I think if I remember the general thrust of the report, the conclusion is that for conventional printing, Government Printing Office does it cheaper. For duplicating that may not be true. In fact, I think that it generally concludes that DPS probably does it cheaper.

Again, that is part of the fundamental questions we have to ask ourselves: Are we going to get more and more into duplicating or are we going to continue with the general printing operation as we have known it in the past?

Mr. HOYER. Mr. Chairman, let me stress, I urge you to visit, and the reason being when you say printing, you immediately think this is what a printing office does. They disseminate contemporaneously on line to any member of the Internet in the United States, contemporaneously, and neither the library or Congress-as I say, I am not an expert on this, can produce can be accessed by members of the Internet as you can in terms of their technology that now exists, which is not printing but is electronic transfer of information.

So we sort of have the blinders on because it is called the Government Printing Office. But they are 21st Century.

DUPLICATIONS IN PRINTING AND INFORMATION DISSEMINATION

Mr. PACKARD. I don't think there is any question they are moving into the 21st Century. The question is, are there other agencies that are doing that also, and where should-should there remain duplication. Shall we allow a growing duplication to exist, or shall we try to put parameters on that aspect, the modern technology of dissemination of information.

The Library of Congress, HIS and others are doing much the same kind of things. And we are seeing the beginning of a very duplicative process in the electronic information age as we see already developed in the conventional printing process.

That is what I think we are looking at to find ways to prevent this duplication emerging in the 21st Century.

Mr. HOYER. When you say duplication, you don't mean duplication of information but duplication of producing information.

Mr. PACKARD. That is correct, and dissemination.

Mr. HOYER. Mr. Thomas has repeatedly talked about this new way of doing things and that the GPO has been trying to protect its turf. In point of fact, there is a tremendous desire on behalf of every agency, from an agency of five to an agency of a million, to have all of its capability in-house, and its people do its work so there is complete control within the agency.

What reinvention and reorganization really talks about-and there may be disagreements as to what that result is-is trying to consolidate, trying to not have every agency do its own thing. GSA obviously is going to be very controversial and we are going to de

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