lot of equipment and more charges about black marketing and debaucheries in Government and everything else. Mr. STAATS. We don't think we will be able to eliminate our office in Saigon in fiscal 1972. Senator HOLLINGS. What would be the number in Saigon? Mr. STAATS. We have 19 there at the moment, and we supplement that with staff from Manila and Honolulu. Chairman ELLENDER. You say you cut back overall 71, and that is due to the wind down of the war. Mr STAATS. And also, we feel, that prioritywise-money in the budget is going more and more into civilian programs like welfare and health and education and we think it prudent to reallocate our resources to give more emphasis to the civilian programs. Senator HOLLINGS. All right. Mr. STAATS. I cover in the next section the additional work that we have as a result of recent legislation. IMPACT OF CONGRESSIONAL ACTIONS ON GAO PROGRAMS The general purpose of certain sections of the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1970 is to provide for better use of the General Accounting Office as an arm of the Congress in examining and analyzing the management of existing Federal programs and further increasing our staff assistance to legislative committees during their consideration of proposals or appropriations for new or revised Federal programs. Section 204 of this Act directs the Comptroller General to review and analyze the results of Government programs and activities carried on under existing law, including the making of cost-benefit studies, when ordered by either House of Congress, or upon his own initiative, or when requested by any committee of the House or Senate, or joint committee of Congress, having jurisdiction over such programs and activities. Section 204 also directs the Comptroller General to have available in the General Accounting Office employees who are expert in analyzing and conducting cost-benefit studies of Government programs. On request, these employees are to assist committees analyze cost-benefit studies furnished by Federal agencies or conduct cost-benefit studies of programs under their jurisdiction. INFORMATION TO CONGRESS Senator COTTON. May I ask a question here for my own guidance? How do you transmit the information you have to the committees of Congress? Do you wait until the chairman or the staff of the committee asks for it, do you provide it automatically to the chairman or to the staff, or what is the procedure? Mr. STAATS. We do this in more than one way. If we get a request from a committee of the Congress, as we have outlined here, and we get many of these, then we make our report to the committee and it is up to the committee as to how it uses that information. It may use it in the conduct of hearings, it may decide to release it. It is their property, and the Committee disposes of it as it likes. Mr STAATS. It goes to the chairman of the committee. Senator COTTON. As a practical matter—for instance, I serve on the subcommittee, and have for 10 years, the subcommittee that deals with HEW. We have in that bill multitudinous programs. I find if I want to know how a program has been working in the last fiscal year, or the last couple of fiscal years, that I find that the clerk of the committee, the majority clerk of the committee who works closely with the chairman, can usually get it. I have to get it from him, and I usually get very good information. I am wondering if that is information he and the chairman get direct from you. In other words, if other members of the committee than the chairman were constantly pestering you people for information on these various departments, you would have to ask for many more additional employees. REQUEST FOR INDIVIDUAL MEMBERS OF CONGRESS Mr. STAATS. Let me comment on that, if I may. We have taken the view that a request that comes in from an individual Member, if it involves Federal operations in his State or in his congressional district and he is concerned that they are not working properly, we will go into the matter to the best of our ability and make a report to him. Senator COTTON. I am very well aware of that. Mr. STAATS. We feel that this is not only in the interests of our bipartisan or nonpartisan role that we honor a request from any Member of Congress, but also many times we find that the Member will uncover a problem which may have broader application. It may be broader than just a problem in his district. REQUESTS FOR INFORMATION FROM COMMITTEES Senator COTTON. I am sorry. I didn't quite get across what my question meant. I don't mean my asking you to investigate or examine to some extent how a program is working in New Hampshire. One of the things that has impressed me for all the years I have served on this committee is that this committee has a staff of only 21. We sit down both in Defense appropriations and in HEW, which are two of the largest, and day after day they come up with budget officers and other personnel and they fill the whole room. We sit here on this side with a majority and minority clerk, a couple of clerks, and as the thing goes on, it seems to me it is awfully difficult for us to be able to successfully dig into these matters. Now, all the years I have served on the committee in the Senate, I have never been on the majority side, so I have never been the chairman. I assume the chairman of each committee and subcommittee, by virtue and perfectly properly so by virtue of his position, if there are reports on certain activities, they go to him, and they are probably handled by the majority clerk. I am just wondering, suppose I desire to know something, such as the education bill, that we are about to report in the Senate just as an example the program for bilingual education. Suppose I want to know how that has been working. Of course, I can ask the people who come up representing it, but very naturally, and I respect them for it, they are up to sell their own particular activity because they believe in it. They think it is the most important thing. Suppose I want information on that, not just as it applies to New Hampshire? Mr. STAATS. Not just about a problem in New Hampshire, but as a general piece of legislation. Senator COTTON. I can readily see that if you had every member of every committee in Congress asking you for information, I can see that you would have to have an army of employees. But I am curious about when I sit in a subcommittee, in many instances does my chairman of my subcommittee or his particular clerk have in his hand. some general reports of yours on the program in that particular area? Mr. STAATS. Let me say this, and then Mr. Keller can add to my statement: If you as a member of the committee are interested in that kind of a question, we could do as a minimum this: We could have our staff knowledgeable on that particular subject come up and brief you on all our work that we have done in that area and our current work that we are doing and give you any information that we have based on work that we have already done. That would be a minimum. Many times when a member has an interest in getting help from our office, it is not just one member, but several members, and to the extent that we can convert this into a committee request rather than just one member, we try to do that because we can get better use of our manpower in this way. Senator COTTON. As a matter of fact, to be specific, I don't want the record to sound as if I was thinking that people were withholding information. As a matter of fact, on the subcommittee on HEW, on which I have served as ranking minority member for years, the chairman, Senator Magnuson, is most cooperative. We have always been able to work together in perfect harmony. I can get information from the majority clerk of the committee, Mr. Dirks, just as well as the Chairman can. When I want information, I usually go to him and I probably should be asking him this question, not you. But I wonder if some of this very good and very accurate information and analyses of different programs that I get from him or the minority clerk, whether that is coming from you, or whether it is coming from their own observations. Mr. KELLER. Senator Cotton, if I may take a hand in trying to answer your question, when we make a report to the Congress, a copy is sent to the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, and also the chairman of the subcommittee having jurisdiction over the agency involved. Also our people work quite closely with the committee staff members. I think two subcommittees in particular use our people rather extensively. We try to service in every way possible the chairman and the members of the committee. I can't say whether some of the information you get may come from us, or not. Mr. STAATS. Our work overall for the committees of Congress has increased very sharply from year to year, in the last 3 or 4 years particularly. In the case of the Appropriations Committees in the House, we have the first 6 months of fiscal year 1971, we did 14 different reports for the House Appropriations Committee. Senator COTTON. Can I ask one more question? Senator HOLLINGS. Please. PROGRAMS OF JOB TRAINING Senator COTTON. For a number of years now I have been baffled by and have never been able to find out to my own satisfaction how many programs of job training there are in the Government. I never have asked this question of your organization because I thought it was one of the things that would be putting an unnecessary burden on you. I don't know to this day, and I have never been able to find out. I never get the same answer from two different people or the same answer twice from the same person. We go through our HEW bill and we find a half a dozen training programs. There are job training programs in the Department of Labor. There are job training programs, I think, in the Department of Agriculture. I know there are job training programs that you might name under that general head in Defense. They are always able to tell us that they aren't duplicating anybody, that they are paralleling the training in the schools and training in technical institutes, and then there is the adult training and so on and so forth. The question I would like to address to your organization to tell me is how many programs there are; whether it is retraining coal miners in West Virginia or whether it is new training for disadvantaged people in the ghettos, just how many Federal programs there are that could be called under the heading of "training." That would be a question that I really wouldn't ask you, because it would require a lot of research, wouldn't it? Mr. STAATS. We would be happy to take a crack at it. I couldn't tell you for sure, because this is one of the areas that we are putting more of our manpower in. EFFECT OF INQUIRIES ON MANPOWER NEEDS Senator COTTON. If you have 25 or 30 Senators asking you a general question like that, and it isn't a specific question on any one program in X department, but asking for a review of a certain type of program through the whole governmental structure-if you had 25 or 30 Senators asking you that a couple of times a year, you would have to have a tremendous number of employees, wouldn't you? Mr. STAATS. Well, it would be hard to estimate how many employees it would take. One thing that is relevant here, however, is that the Congress has increased its staff for the Congressional Research Service. A great many inquiries of a strictly factual nature have been addressed by the Members of the Congressional Research Service. Senator COTTON. It has been my impression that they usually make use of that service to get information when they go to make a speech somewhere. As a matter of fact, and I don't want to say this-I know there are many problems and I am not saying this in derogation of the Library of Congress-but if I addressed a question such as I just asked you to the Legislative Research Service, I would not get an answer back from them in time for 1973 hearings, to say nothing of the 1972 appropriations. I won't go on with this. Mr. STAATS. I would say, Senator Cotton, that this is one that we could take on, and I would be willing to hazard a guess we could get you a reasonably prompt answer on it, but just to pursue the point a little further, one of the things that we are interested in and what is implied in your question is whether there is duplication and whether or not we are getting our money's worth out of manpower training programs. That is the emphasis that we have been putting on it. Senator COTTON. That would be the purpose of my question, of course. MAKING REVIEWS USEFUL TO CONGRESS Mr. STAATS. That is the purpose of our getting into it. One of the things we need to know in order to get at that question is what are the programs involved for disadvantaged youth, for example, in the urban area, farm training, and so on. So that I wouldn't be, frankly, too much concerned about this, because we do not go out and, you might say, peddle-if I can use the word our services to the Members of Congress. But we have taken the position that to be most effective, our office should try to know or anticipate what Congress is going to be concerned about and try to direct our work in areas that are going to be most useful to the Congress. There is no point in our office undertaking work which is really not relevant to the congressional interests. Now, we do have some statutory responsibility for going into programs like the corporations, for example. We are required to audit them once a year. We have other statutory responsibilities that we have to carry out. But beyond that, we have tried in our own program, where we are initiating the studies ourselves, and not as a result of a direct request from Congress, we try still to move into areas which we think the Congress is going to be concerned with. Medical costs, for example, and manpower training is another one which you have already referred to. So that in our own efforts we try to anticipate this need as much as we can. Senator COTTON. Thank you. TYPES OF REVIEWS Senator HOLLINGS. Senator Cotton raised very interesting questions there. What programs would GAO initiate itself? Mr. STAATS. This is set forth here in my statement. Senator HOLLINGS. You are going to set it forth there. All right. Specifically other than auditing functions, finding out where the money went and so forth, what about the intent, the effectiveness of the program and the intent of Congress? Do you give a report back |