Y 4.674/9: S.hrg. 100-538 S. HRG. 100-538 FEDERAL ADVISORY COMMITTEE ACT AND CIS RECORD ONLY: HEARING BEFORE THE COMMITTEE ON ONE HUNDREDTH CONGRESS FIRST SESSION DECEMBER 3, 1987 Printed for the use of the Committee on Governmental Affairs For sale by the Superintendent of Documents, Congressional Sales Office DOCUME Michael H. Cardozo, former executive director, Association of American Law Schools; and Paul G. Dembling, senior partner, Schnader, Harrison, Segal Rosslyn S. Kleeman, Senior Associate Director, General Accounting Office, accompanied by Lynn Gibson, Office of General Counsel, and Greg Ziombra, Evaluator Eric R. Glitzenstein, Public Citizen Litigation Group; Robert F. Murray, Jr., M.D., professor of pediatrics, medicine, and oncology, Howard University College of Medicine, and William B. Rubenstein, American Civil Liberties Adm. James D. Watkins, U.S. Navy (ret.), Chairman, Presidential Commission on the Human Immuniodeficiency Virus Epidemic, accompanied by Polly Paul T. Weiss, Associate Administrator for Administration, General Services Administration, accompanied by James L. Dean, Director, Committee Man- Weiss, Paul T.-Continued Responses to written questions submitted by Senator Roth. Page Prepared statements of witnesses in order of appearance. FEDERAL ADVISORY COMMITTEE ACT AND THE PRESIDENT'S AIDS COMMISSION THURSDAY, DECEMBER 3, 1987 U.S. SENATE, COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS, Washington, DC. The Committee met, pursuant to notice, at 9:30 a.m., in room SD-342, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. John Glenn (Chairman of the Committee) presiding. Present: Senators Glenn, Roth, and Levin. OPENING STATEMENT OF CHAIRMAN GLENN Chairman GLENN. The hearing will be in order. First off, I do want to announce we will go ahead with the hearing. We have a vote on the floor and Senator Levin is going to vote now and will be here in a few minutes. I will go ahead and start the hearing and he will spell me while I go over and vote. So I am sorry we will have a rather truncated beginning this morning, but that is one of the problems when we have votes and try and conduct hearings at the same time. This is our first hearing on the Federal Advisory Committee Act [FACA]. FACA represents one of the four pillars of open-government laws. It fits right along with the Government in the Sunshine Act, the Freedom of Information Act, and the Administrative Procedures Act. By passing FACA in 1972, Congress recognized the merits of allowing the Government to draw upon the knowledge and experience of public experts, and at a reasonable cost. And that is something we have encouraged. In return, the public is supposed to be afforded an opportunity to participate actively in the Government's decisionmaking process. I think most of the time it works out exactly like that, and that is good. To achieve these simple objectives, Congress created a comprehensive legal and administrative system to regulate the establishment, the operation and termination of these advisory committees. Over the past 15 years it is clear that this system has served the Government and the public quite well. And the real costs to the taxpayer have been held reasonably stable, as evidence by a few very telling statistics. For instance, the total number of chartered advisory committees has remained relatively constant since 1979 with approximately 1,000 committees, councils, advisory groups of one type or another in existence at any one time. (1) |