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SUMMARY OF PUBLICATIONS BOUND FOR HOUSE COMMITTEES-FISCAL YEAR 1978

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1 A summary of work ordered during fiscal year 1978, through the Office of the Clerk of the House for Members and billed to the congressional printing and binding appropriation.

SUMMARY OF PUBLICATIONS BOUND FOR SENATE COMMITTEES-FISCAL YEAR 1978

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A summary of work ordered during fiscal year 1978, through the Office of the Secretary of the Senate for Members and billed to the congressional printing and binding appropriation.

Question. How many of House Appropriations hearings did you publish in 1978 and was that more or less than in 1977? What percentage of all House hearings does House Appropriations hearings constitute (in pages)?

Response. In 1978 there were 81,582 pages of House Appropriations hearings printed. This compares with 76,944 printed in 1977. House Appropriations hearings are approximately 21 percent of all House hearings, of which 390,748 pages were printed in Fiscal Year 1978.

Question. Last year, we placed language in the bill restricting the distribution of bound and biweekly Congressional Records. What savings do you expect in the 1980 budget as a result? Why are you asking for the same language again-we have already made it permanent law?

RESTRICTION OF CERTAIN PUBLICATIONS

Response. We are unable to estimate the savings pertaining to the restricted distribution of the bound and biweekly Congressional Records until the Joint Committee on Printing receives the results from a recent survey of the Members. As soon as the results are known we will be able to estimate the reduction in volume and the corresponding reduction in the Fiscal Year 1980 Budget request. In response to why we included the restriction in the 1980 language, we were merely attempting to emphasize the Appropriation Committee's position regarding the bound and biweekly Congressional Records.

STATUS OF GPO FACILITIES

Mr. SMITH. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I am new on this subcommittee, and I am not sure if the Chairman knows the answer, but a good many of us in the House don't. Are your facilities archaic down there, or why can't you get faster service?

Mr. BOYLE. Well, Mr. Smith, our equipment is not archaic. The building is.

Mr. SMITH. But your equipment is not?

Mr. BOYLE. I would say, and I am proud to say, that we have as modern, if not a more modern, printing operation than any other printing plant in the country for doing the type of work that we do. Mr. SMITH. Why does it take so long to get service?

PRINTING OF BILLS

Mr. BOYLE. I didn't know it took long. We are pretty proud of the quick turnaround we have.

Mr. SMITH. Sometimes it takes three or four days to get a bill printed.

Mr. BOYLE. That could be, according to the time of the year. Mr. Smith, right now all of our introduced bills are delivered on an overnight basis. Starting in the beginning of a Congress, we get hit with every single bill that-

Mr. SMITH. That is not as important. But when you get to the last days of the Congress, you have to have them overnight or it is dead.

Mr. BOYLE. In the first few days of Congress we receive thousands of bills, and this year, we printed all of the bills that were introduced faster than ever.

Mr. SMITH. That is not as important. When you get to the last days of the Congress, it has to be printed overnight or that bill is dead.

Mr. BOYLE. Let me say that in the last days of the Congress we were totally swamped. We had hundreds of amendments submitted for overnight printing on one bill alone. We get deluged with bills

in the beginning of a session and we are totally swamped in the end of the session. There is no way possible any printing plant in the country or all the printing plants on the East Coast could keep up with the last two weeks of Congress on an overnight schedule. I believe we do quite well under the circumstances.

CONTRACTING OUT OF BILLS

Mr. SMITH. During that period of time would you be better off contracting some, or would that be an impossible thing, too?

Mr. BOYLE. Contracting is not very practical on very short scheduled work. Contracting is more practical when we have the time to write a specification, put the contract out on bid, get a contractor to do it in a reasonable amount of time. Overnight is not a reasonable schedule in the printing industry.

Mr. SMITH. You don't set print down there?

Mr. BOYLE. Set type?

Mr. SMITH. Yes.

Mr. BOYLE. We have the largest typesetting operation in the world.

ERRORS IN BILLS

Mr. SMITH. I sent a bill down there, and it came back and had 12 errors. I marked them and sent it back down. This is a committee bill reported out of the full committee. I sent it back down there; those 12 were corrected, and there were 18 new ones. How can you make mistakes like that?

Mr. BOYLE. Anytime there is only one proofreading, and they are reading at two, three, four or five o'clock in the morning and have been working 10 hours a day; they are bound to miss some errors. There isn't any publication in the United States that can be printed error-free with one proofreading.

Mr. SMITH. How do you make errors where they were not before? Mr. BOYLE. In linotype-type material, where the error was marked, the operator set the line over and made another error in the line. With our present method of electronic photocomposition the operator does not have to set the line over. The operator will only set the correction and

Mr. SMITH. When did you get that equipment?

Mr. BOYLE. We have been working with that equipment for several years. This year for the first time all bills in the House and the Senate will go through this system. It will help that problem. Mr. SMITH. This, I think, was last year when it happened. It makes an impossible situation on the floor, because when you have 18 errors to correct, anybody who wants to hold up a bill in the last month of the Congress can require you to make 18 amendments on the floor, and it is impossible. We can't operate around here that

way.

Mr. BOYLE. It makes problems in our operation, too, because any time there are 18 errors or one error in the bill, the bill has to be reprinted, and if each time we print it, we make more errors, we are never going to get finished.

15-533 O-796 (Pt. 2)

DELAY IN RECEIVING COMMITTEE REPORTS

Mr. SMITH. And committee reports, too. It has been taking us a week-I am not talking about right now, but last summer, like in June and July, it took a week to get a committee report back. Mr. BOYLE. Yes, sir, in that period when all appropriation bills had to be on the floor by a certain date, we had as many as 80 to 100 reports to print overnight. We can't do that quantity of work overnight together with our other urgent Congressional work. And anytime you try to rush the typesetting operation, we are going to make mistakes, and the shorter the amount of time we have, the more mistakes we are going to make. The solution is to cut down the amount of keyboarding by using new methods and processes. Mr. SMITH. Why is it worse than it used to be? I think it is a lot worse than it was three or four years ago.

Mr. BOYLE. Let me say this: that in the entire country, in every craft, I don't care whether it is the printer, pressman, carpenter, plumber, or whoever, people do not seem to have the motivation they had 10 or 15 or 20 years ago. The unions will probably disagree, but it is true. Our people are not doing the job as well as they were 15 years ago. I don't think many people in this country are doing the job as well as they were doing 15 or 20 years ago.

Mr. SMITH. Accuracy and speed both are so important in the legislative process. I mean it bogs you clear down if you can't get accurate, speedy work. You do a lot of work, though, and this certainly has the highest priority.

Mr. BOYLE. The Congressional Record has a high priority-we have never missed a Congressional Record.

Mr. SMITH. You had a couple of days there you didn't get them for two days.

DELIVERY OF CONGRESSIONAL RECORD

Mr. BOYLE. The Congressional Record?

Mr. SMITH. Yes. We were in session late at night and didn't get it all the next day, and it was the day after that before we got it. Mr. BOYLE. But we got the Congressional Record out. There has never been a day we didn't-

Mr. SMITH. After we had gone home.

Mr. BOYLE. Mr. Smith, when we get copy at five or six o'clock in the morning, there is no way possible that we can set it in type, proofread it, print it, and bind it and deliver that portion by eight o'clock in the morning.

Mr. SMITH. A couple of days we didn't even get it the next day. Mr. BOYLE. We delivered every single Congressional Record the following morning. I have a list of times when the Congressional Record was delivered to the House and Senate post office, and there has never been in the history of the GPO, to my knowledge, including storms, and floods, or what-have-you, that we did not deliver a Congressional Record to the House and Senate post office the morning after the House and the Senate were in. With one exception and that was when the city was in turmoil after the assassination of Dr. King.

Mr. SMITH. Are you talking about when we are in until midnight?

Mr. BOYLE. One, two, three o'clock in the morning, 24-hour filibuster or what have you.

Mr. SMITH. Then there is something wrong with your delivery. It is not getting up here to us. I can tell you there were several days that happened.

Mr. BOYLE. I believe I know what the problem is. We get the copies into the post offices, and if we don't make it by a certain time in the morning and miss the postal people going around with the first delivery, the delivery could come later in the day.

Mr. SMITH. You don't send them by mail?

Mr. BOYLE. No, sir. We deliver the copies to the House and the Senate. We deliver them to the floor; we deliver them to the House post office and Senate post office. We deliver by truck about 8,000 copies to the Hill.

Mr. SMITH. Is there anything that can be done? I know other committee chairmen are saying the same thing: we have to do something about GPO; we can't operate this way; it is taking so long to get committee reports and they contain so many errors. When the committee report comes back, you have to put two or three people on it for three days to find the errors, and they drop whole paragraphs sometimes.

Mr. BOYLE. I know.

Mr. SMITH. Is there anything that can be done to make the service a little better, or at least get it back to where it was three or four years ago?

Mr. BOYLE. This is the first time your problem has been brought to my attention. I have a file of letters that high from committee chairmen complimenting us on the service and saying it is better than it has ever been before. I was under the impression we were getting better.

Mr. SMITH. Everyone I talked to has said they are having the same trouble.

Mr. BOYLE. This is the first time it has been brought to my attention. I get mostly the opposite view. But, yes, we are attempting to improve the quality. We have quality control programs, and modern equipment. As far as meeting totally impossible schedules, you couldn't get the Congressional Record that occurred on the last day of the Congress printed anywhere else in the world in any one printing plant.

Mr. SMITH. That actually isn't nearly as important as committee reports.

Mr. BOYLE. No, sir. Reports are very important.

Mr. SMITH. We send the report over and it takes a week to get it back, and it has taken a week. And then you get it back, and you just know before it comes back, you are going to have to send it back again. You can never use the report the first time it comes back. It has to be redone a second time. It just makes it impossible to operate. I don't know what the problems are. That is what I wanted to know.

Is there anything that can be done to improve it?

Mr. BOYLE. As I say, the equipment that we now have and the process we now have will help.

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