and the Federal Aviation Administration issued instructions which should result in more direct citizen involvement in Government financed highway and construction projects.

Eliminating unsafe products.-As a result of a GAO recommendation, an evaluation of red No. 2 color additive was performed, which led to a Food and Drug Administration ban on its use in foods, drugs, and cosmetics.

CONCLUSION

Mr. Chairman, this concludes my opening statement. My associates and I will be happy to answer any questions you may have.

PLANNED APPLICATION OF RESOURCES BY DIVISIONS AND OFFICES

REPORTS TO COMMITTEES AND MEMBERS OF CONGRESS FISCAL YEAR 1976 AND FIRST 3 MO OF 1977 AND REQUESTS ON HAND AT DEC. 31, 1976

REPORTS TO COMMITTEES AND MEMBERS OF CONGRESS FISCAL YEAR 1976 AND FIRST 3 MO OF 1977 AND REQUESTS ON HAND AT DEC. 31, 1976—Continued

HIGHLIGHTS OF GENERAL STATEMENT

Mr. STAATS. I will do some reading and some summarizing. Let me say in opening that we appreciate the interest and support we have had from this subcommittee in particular and the fact that we have had, we think, very profitable and good relationships with the Appropriations Committees of both the House and the Senate. We have prepared and at some point we would like to call your attention to a summary of the work that is in process, with the House Appropriations Committee. [NOTE. The summary referred to has been retained in the Committee files.] I have worked with Chairman Mahon many years when I was in the Bureau of the Budget, and I told him when I joined the General Accounting Office, we would give first priority to any request that we had from the Appropriations Committees, as far as I was concerned, because I felt the importance of the role we play in relationship to the very difficult job that these committees have.

GROWTH IN GENERAL ACCOUNTING OFFICE

You have referred to the growth in the GAO, and we have grown. A good deal of that is inflation in terms of costs of people, and costs of material, and costs of space and things of this type. When I joined GAO, we had something over 2,400 professional people. We are up around 3,800 today, between 3,800 and 3,900, so that we have grown some, but our job has, I think, grown even more.

Mr. SHIPLEY. Congress is responsible, are they not?

Mr. STAATS. I guess I would have to say that is correct; yes.

Our stance has been on a great many of these things to try to avoid taking on new things but the fundamental point here is that every time there is a new law, every time there is any expansion of an existing program, then our work automatically goes up if we are going to audit those programs, and we obviously feel we have to do that.

Now the new economic program is coming up before the Congress and is in hearings now. If that is enacted, it will increase our workload without anybody giving us new statutory assignments. Each of these statutes provides for us to have access to information and records for audit and evaluation purposes. This is the main point I wanted to stress.

DIRECT ASSISTANCE TO CONGRESS

The other thing I would like to stress is when I became Comptroller General about 8 percent of our effort was in response to direct requests from Members of Congress. Today, it is 34 percent. That has been the other increase in our overall situation.

Mr. SHIPLEY. Let me interrupt, if I may, for a moment.

Mr. STAATS. Thirty-four percent, of course, of a larger staff, too. Mr. SHIPLEY. Yes; right. But you said individual members and committees. The majority of your direct assistance work is generated by committees, is it not?

Mr. STAATS. Yes; in terms of workload. If you take it in terms of numbers of requests, I don't think it would be that much different, but in terms of workload, and that is what counts as far as we are concerned, it would come from the committees.

Mr. KELLER. About one-third of the total direct congressional assistance comes from the Members.

RESPONSE TO REQUESTS OF INDIVIDUAL MEMBERS

Mr. SHIPLEY. Of course, you don't fulfill many requests that you get from individual Members, either.

Mr. STAATS. No; the way it works is that when a committee asks us to go into some program, we work with them in terms of what is feasible, what is doable from our point of view, and we have found them ordinarily reasonable in terms of understanding our workload situation, and we will frequently help them in framing the wording of

the request, itself. And we appreciate that. By law we are required to respond to committee requests. This is from the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1970 and the Congressional Budget Act of 1974. We are not required by law to respond to requests that come from individual Members on matters of concern to them back in their district.

Mr. SHIPLEY. That is my understanding.

Mr. STAATS. But in practice we have attempted to help them if they cannot get the necessary help from the agency. We find frequently they have already been to the agency for help and are not satisfied with the answers they get. If it is something like base closures, and currently we are getting requests of the cost of in-house versus contracting out resulting from OMB's new policy of trying to force more contracting out into the private sector, and the question comes up which is the cheaper way to do it. The agency ordinarily has made their judgment because they are proposing to go out on contract, so what the Member is interested in is getting us to make an independent judgment as to where the benefits are in terms of strictly the cost of doing it by Government people or of doing it by contracting people.

This is an example. We have many of these. There is another reason we have felt that we ought to keep the door open to responding to individual Members' requests, and that is that we have taken it almost as a doctrine of faith that the Congress intends GAO to be a strictly nonpartisan organization. If we respond only to committee requests and matters, then we are, of course, serving only one party, whichever party is in power.

We get requests sometimes that relate to equal opportunity matters, where there is concern, and these have come from black Members of Congress, about discrimination in the operation of Federal programs, and we feel that this is an area that we should be in a position to respond. We are getting fewer of those now than we did a few years ago, but a few years ago we were getting quite a large number of them. Mr. HUGHES. I think the workload waxes and wanes. Currently we are having a surge of requests on the gas situation, such as: Is it real, what is the situation, et cetera? Some of them are difficult to respond to. Mr. STAATS. We are getting a large number of requests concerning the economic development grants from Members who feel that their State has been discriminated against on population count.

Mr. KELLER. I think that totaled up to 74 requests during the last few weeks from individual Members. It all gets at the same problem so it would be ore job of reviewing the method of allocation used for the grants.

Mr. STAATS. If you look at the requests that we get, as Mr. Keller says, the requests we get from individual Members as against committees, or other special study assignments that may come about in the statute, these represent roughly about one-third of that total; in other words, about a third of the 34 percent is represented by work that we do for individual Members.

This doesn't concern us too much as long as it is within that kind of a boundary. We have an overall concern about what happens to that total 34 percent, though, because it has gone up, and we have to keep in mind that our basic responsibility is to audit the operations of the executive branch. In contrast, the Congressional Research Service, the Congressional Budget Office, and the Office of Technology Assess

ment all directly serve the Congress. One-third of our effort is of the same general nature, but the other two-thirds is work that we feel in a sense almost has to come first, and we want to protect our capability to carry out our overall charter, which is to audit and evaluate and investigate the operations of the executive agencies.

BREAKDOWN OF REQUESTS FROM HOUSE AND SENATE

Mr. SHIPLEY. We would like to have a breakdown of the requests you receive from the House and Senate. Are they rather equal or does the Senate draw upon your services more, or do you have any way of determining that?

M. STAATS. I don't really have those figures in mind, but it would be roughly the same, I would think. Mr. Keller, do you have information on that question? I don't believe it is broken down between the two bodies.

Mr. KELLER. I don't believe we have it broken down. But we can see if we can work it up.

Mr. SHIPLEY. I don't want you to put two more staff people on your rolls to find out, but if you have a way to determine it we would like to know.

Mr. STAATS. We have a total, and it would be a matter of breaking it down so it would be no problem at all.

Mr. SHIPLEY. I think it would be helpful.

Mr. KELLER. We keep costs figures on all our work, and it would be a matter of segregating it.

Mr. SHIPLEY. I would appreciate it if you would furnish that to the committee.

[The information requested follows:]

The following table shows a comparison of the number of requests GAO has received from the House and the Senate for 1973 through 1976. The requests cover a wide range of issues, some of which required minimal efforts, some of which required significant efforts. The greatest number of requests have been received from the House but the amount of GAO resources required for response has remained about the same for the House and the Senate.

OVERALL FINANCIAL AND STAFF REQUIREMENTS

Mr. STAATS. On page 1, we have summarized our present situation in 1977, which shows we started with an appropriation of $150,580,000, and then we have a total supplemental request which will add another $6,868,500, bringing up the total of $157,948,500, but then we will ab