WORKLOAD IMPACT OF PENDING LEGISLATION

Mr. STAATS. We are not asking for any new staff for new workload that would be generated in this Congress. We know that this is likely to happen. There are eight bills pending today in the Congress which would give GAO additional responsibilities.

One of these, for example, is the lobby registration statute. Both the House and Senate bill would provide that GAO would administer that statute. It depends on which version comes through as to how it will affect our workload, but both the House and Senate bill contemplate that we have to take on that responsibility.

QUANTIFIED SAVINGS

You have properly emphasized that the priority that this Congress should be giving to reducing the Federal budget deficit, and I think that GAO has helped, and I think we can help Congress more in this regard. In the past two years, direct quantifiable savings that are auditable, resulting from GAO recommendations, add up to $8.2 billion. That is more than 20 times our budget for those two years.

More than three-fourths of these savings came as a result of work that we initiated ourselves in GAO. It is this self-initiated work which will suffer if we cannot obtair additional staff for the new work which Congress continues to give us.

I would like to make one other point before I turn to my prepared statement. I know there has been expressed concern about the growth and the cost of the legislative branch budget of which we are, of course, a part. I would like to emphasize, though, that not more than 75 percent of the budget of the legislative branch is really in direct support of the Congress itself. Many activities of the GAO, the Library of Congress, and the Government Printing Office carry out governmentwide responsibilities. Sixty-three percent of the work we do cannot be properly charged as direct support to the Congress, and 37 percent properly can.

But even so, even if you charge the full billion dollars the budget for the entire legislative branch represents less than two-tenths of one percent of the total Federal budget. This certainly does not seem unreasonable and I don't really personally see why Congress needs to be apologetic.

But if you want to look at it from a different point of view, with the money that the GAO saves for the legislative branch, you can say Congress is making a profit, or you are making a net reduction in the budget. GAO savings this last year were $22 billion. The previous year they were between $5.6 and $5.7 billion, so as far as the GAO is concerned, I would like to make this additional point: The GAO's increase in the last 10 years is only about two-thirds of the rate of increase for the Congress, as a whole.

So we are here today, I think, Mr. Chairman, looking for help, and we think we can help serve the Congress better, to save money, and to improve the operations of the Federal Government. We can't continue to save money if our budget continues to go down instead of up, when everything else is going up. Our workload has had a terrific increase.

So I am really making a plea here for some relief. I feel strongly about the mission of GAO, obviously, and I think that the fact that Congress is turning to GAO more and more for help and for testimony is an indication that they feel that way about it, too. But we need some relief from where we are today.

That is the overall situation, as I see it, and, if I may, I would like now to turn to the supplemental request that we are asking for, which is less than the five percent reduction we took, by the way.

Unless you have questions I will go ahead with the 1980 presentation.

Mr. BENJAMIN. I would be pleased if you would.

FISCAL YEAR 1980 APPROPRIATION REQUEST

Mr. STAATS. The request we are supporting today is for $206,763,000 to fund 5,350 staff years. It is an increase of $17,506,300 over our fiscal year 1979 obligational authority and the supplemental funding that we have requested for that year. Of this total increase of $17.5 million, $6.2 million is necessary to fund 168 additional staff years for workload increases which we must meet and over which we have virtually no control. The balance of the increase-$11.3 million-is required to support our current oper

ations.

The GAO "Justification of Estimates for Fiscal Year 1980", which has already been given to you, details the basis for our request and the manner in which we plan to use all of the resources that we have requested for that year. My statement today will point up the reasons that I believe it is important for GAO to be funded at this increased level and to briefly describe and illustrate the kinds of workload increases that we now know we must meet in fiscal year 1980. I will also discuss the extent to which we have kept the requested increase to a minimum through plans to absorb major portions of the increased workload by reprograming from day-to-day responsibilities under GAO's basic statutes.

Since January 1978, when we presented our fiscal year 1979 appropriation request, our workload-which we will have to perform in fiscal year 1980-has increased by 350 staff years. This workload has been the result of completed congressional actions and increased congressional requests for audits and evaluations. As a part of our fiscal year 1979 supplemental request, we are requesting some partial relief-totaling 82 staff years-to meet the fiscal year 1979 impact of these new workload demands. In this requestfor fiscal year 1980-we are asking for the continued funding of these 82 staff years, plus funding for an additional 168 staff years in 1980. The aggregate, or 250 staff years, will only partially satisfy the significant increase in workload that we must perform.

Since my appointment in 1966, there have been many statutory changes, such as the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1970, the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, which both broadened the scope of GAO's overall responsibilities and added to our specific responsibilities.

However, this tremendous increase in workload, aggregating 350 staff years in less than one year is unparalleled in our history. It

poses a major management problem to us: i.e., how do we meet the new and recurring demands of the Congress and at the same time continue to maintain the high level quality standard that is clearly expected by the Congress?

Clearly, this cannot be done without some increase in resources. We have concluded that it will be possible for us to absorb 100 staff years of the 350 staff-year workload increase. This means that— with favorable action on our request for an increase of 250 staff years-we will be absorbing 28 percent of the increased workload. We plan to absorb this increased workload by reprograming from or further deferring work required by our basic statutes.

After several reexaminations, we are convinced that no further absorption is possible without substantial work deferrals or stretchouts.

ACCESS TO RECORDS PROBLEMS

Mr. BENJAMIN. Would you withhold for a minute, and we will continue with your statement? I would like to allow Mr. Rudd to ask a question or two before he has to depart.

Mr. RUDD. Mr. Chairman, I am deeply grateful for that. All I want to do is to underscore some of your opening remarks before you got to the statement. You made a statement that you felt the Members of Congress would feel the same way as you do about the use of your office, and, of course, I agree with that. There is every indication that more Members are going to be utilizing your services. I have certainly had excellent responses from the General Accounting Office, and I want to say that in a very complimentary way, and to commend you.

But I want to touch on one issue that relates to what you were talking about in the opening remarks. On June 14th last year, I wrote and asked you to determine whether members of the U.S. Metric Board had been appointed according to specific statutory requirements of the law which was passed by Congress in 1975, and that is title 15, section 205 of the United States Code.

You tried for more than 8 months to review this matter, but you were blocked both by the White House and the Justice Department-blocked from access to the files which are in the White House personnel office. The GAO is the investigative arm of the Congress, and I am not sure everybody understands that. Committees and Members of Congress rely and will probably continue to rely on you to a greater extent to perform a wide variety of studies and audits, including reviews of executive branch actions, to determine whether laws passed by Congress are being properly adhered to or even obeyed in such instances. I would very much appreciate knowing whether you have been similarly refused access to files in other instances, for the record, please.

Mr. STAATS. We will be happy to supply that for the record, Congressman Rudd.

[The information follows:]

ACCESS TO EXECUTIVE BRANCH RECORDS

On a number of occasions over the years the General Accounting Office has encountered difficulty in obtaining

from Executive branch agencies and other organizations records to which we have a right of access by law or agreement. The following very recent examples serve to illustrate this problem. Within the past year, we encountered serious access to records difficulties at the White House in connection with two audits requested by congressional sources.

In one case

the Chairman of the Subcommittee on Energy and Power of the House Commerce Committee had asked us to review Federal planning efforts in relation to last winter's coal strike. The development and evaluation of unemployment estimates by the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) was a key aspect of the audit. The White House refused our request for specific CEA records on this matter and we were forced to issue our report without the information. The refusal was said to be

based on a Justice Department memorandum challenging our access rights. In fact, the Justice Department memorandum merely suggested that additional study might well provide a basis for the President's invoking "executive privilege" in response to our request. "Executive privilege" was never invoked. Following issuance of our report and on the day before a Subcommittee hearing on the matter, CEA provided most of the records that had previously been denied to us.

35-533 79 37 (Pt. 2)

The second case involved a request by Congressman Eldon Rudd that we review whether United States Metric Board members were appointed from segments of the concerned communities as required by statute. Despite repeated followup inquiries, we received no response to our request for access to the necessary records for several months. Finally the White House denied this request on the basis of the same Justice Department memorandum. Thus we were unable to perform the audit. Again the Justice Department suggested a claim of "executive privilege" but, to the best of our knowledge, it was never invoked. These cases illustrate the full range of our access problems. We encountered long delays in obtaining any response to our access requests. When the responses finally arrived in

the form of denials, the legal basis was not articulated.

In the Metric Board matter, the response alluded to areas of concern which might have been accomodated, but no serious effort was made to seek an accomodation. In the CEA matter, most of the information was provided after issuance of the report with no explanation as to why it could not have been furnished months earlier.

Pursuant to the requests of over 30 Members of Congress we initiated a review of the circumstances surrounding a grant by the Department of Labor to the United Farmworkers of America. Our initial requests for access to agency