COMMITTEE ON APPROPRIATIONS

BOB LIVINGSTON, Louisiana, Chairman

JAMES W. DYER, Clerk and Staff Director

LEGISLATIVE BRANCH APPROPRIATIONS FOR

FISCAL YEAR 1998

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 4, 1997.

Mr. WALSH. The committee will come to order.

We begin by welcoming everyone to our hearing today. My name is Jim Walsh. I am the new Chairman of the Legislative Branch Subcommittee on Appropriations. Ed Lombard is the clerk for the subcommittee and resident institutional memory. And we have a number of new Members who I will introduce in just a second.

What I would like to do is just make a couple of personal comments, if I may, and that is that I am really excited about this opportunity to chair this very, very important subcommittee. I think all of us who are here have a sense of the history of the place and the institution that we belong to, and I think one of the benefits of being on this subcommittee is that we will learn a great deal more about this institution and the legislative branch.

There are literally thousands of people who work for the Congress, the House, the Senate, the Library, the other departments. think we need to let them know that we care about them and that the decisions that we make in this subcommittee will affect them. And we hope it will affect them in a positive way. We want to improve their quality of life, where they work, the conditions they work in. What they do is very, very important to all of us and the ability our ability to do our jobs.

We are entrusted with a great deal, the bill we produce, and for me it is very exciting to have oversight for the House, the Senate, especially the House, and the Library of Congress and all the other agencies we have in our jurisdiction.

The Library of Congress is the repository of our Nation's history. It has it all, from the Mayflower, to Yorktown, to Kitty Hawk, Pearl Harbor, the Apollo project, right up until today, and they will be recording the history of whatever we accomplish or fail to accomplish in the 105th Congress. So it is really a neat subcommittee assignment, and I hope everybody enjoys it as much as I do, or more, perhaps.

Before we begin, I would like to welcome the Members of the subcommittee. We have a number of changes, a number of new individuals. And as I said, my name is Jim Walsh, I am from New York State, New York's 25th Congressional District, Syracuse is my home. I am the Chair.

We also have on our side, Bill Young of Florida, the returning Vice Chairman; Duke Cunningham of California. Good to have you with us, Duke.

Zach Wamp of Tennessee. Zach is just arriving.

Good to have you with us, Zach.

And Tom Latham of Iowa. So we go pretty much from East to West.

Back East we have our Ranking Member and my good friend, José Serrano of New York, the other part of New York that I am not quite as familiar as I am with Syracuse, and he can tell you more about that, and I am sure he will. He returns as a Ranking Minority Member, and he is joined by Vic Fazio the former Chair, and Marcy Kaptur of Ohio.

We also have the Chairman of the full Committee on Appropriations, Bob Livingston of Louisiana, and Dave Obey Ranking Minority Member of the full committee, they are also Members of this subcommittee.

JURISDICTION OF THE SUBCOMMITTEE

I will insert in the record the current jurisdiction of the subcommittee which has been established under the rules of the Committee on Appropriations.

[The information follows:]

SUBCOMMITTEE ON LEGISLATIVE

House of Representatives.

Joint Items.

Architect of the Capital (Except Senate Items).

Botanic Garden.

Congressional Budget Office.

General Accounting Office.

Government Printing Office.

John C. Stennis Center.

Library of Congress, including:

Congressional Research Service.

Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel.

Copyright Office.

National Film Preservation Board.

United States Capitol Preservation Commission.

Mr. WALSH. Several agencies included as legislative branch agencies in the President's budget are not under the jurisdiction of this subcommittee. For example, the U.S. Tax Court is one agency classified as a legislative agency in the President's budget, but that agency is actually funded in the Commerce, Justice, State and Judiciary appropriations bill.

Likewise, the Helsinki Commission, the Prospective Payment Commission and several other agencies are not within our bill.

The President's budget has not yet been delivered to the Congress. It will be soon. However, for the past several weeks, the legislative agencies and all Federal agencies have been submitting their budget material to the Office of Management and Budget in preparation for the expected delivery to the Congress on Thursday of this week, the President's budget.

Under statute, the legislative budget must be submitted to the Congress in the President's budget without change by OMB. During the process of preparing the Federal budget for 1998, we have asked those agencies under our jurisdiction to provide copies to the subcommittee of the material they are sending to OMB. We did that in order to get an early start on our hearings.

This has been the customary practice over the years, and both Majority and Minority have always agreed to this procedure.

MEMBERS' INFORMATIONAL MATERIALS

The staff has compiled the customary budget material for the use of the Members of the subcommittee. The draft Legislative Branch Appropriations Bill, Fiscal Year 1998, Subcommittee Print, contains the bill language and funding requests that will be included in the President's budget document, primarily the budget appendix. The subcommittee print is labeled as a draft, since the formal budget submission has not arrived. We believe it will not change in any significant extent, if at all. The subcommittee print also contains a great deal of historical information that the Members may find useful.

The Legislative Branch Appropriations For 1998, Hearings, Part 1, contains the budget justifications that the agencies have prepared in explanation of their budget requests. Part 1 contains what the agencies have provided to the committee by way of explaining their budget requests. Both of these documents have been provided to each Member.

Part 1 will be made available as a public document when the hearings are completed.

The budget that we are going to consider in this subcommittee totals $1.9 billion, just under that amount. That figure does not include the operating budget of the Senate. That budget will be taken up by our counterpart subcommittee in the other body.

The budget for Congressional Operations is $1.1 billion. That encompasses the House of Representatives operating budget, the Joint Committees and the various support agencies such as the Capitol Police, the Architect, the Congressional Budget Office, the Office of Compliance, Congressional Research Service, and congressional printing at the Government Printing Office.

The balance of the funds requested, $710 million, approximately, is for other agencies in the legislative budget, primarily the Library of Congress, Superintendent of Documents, Federal Depository Library Program, General Accounting Office, Botanical Garden, and the care of the Library grounds by the Architect.

SUBCOMMITTEE'S ROLE

As I mentioned earlier, these budgets have been submitted to the Office of Management and Budget by each of the legislative branch agencies separately. By law, OMB will include these budget requests in the President's budget without change.

Since OMB cannot and should not make policy or dollar-level changes in these legislative budgets, this committee will perform a double function. We will scrub these budgets much the same as OMB does the executive agency budgets, and, when the 602(b) budget allocations are given to the subcommittee, we will markup the legislative branch appropriations bill to conform with our overall budget targets.

So what we see and hear today are requests of the agencies to OMB, they are submitted as part of the President's budget, but they have not been scrubbed and we will have to perform that duty.

As we proceed through the process, we will consult with the authorizing committees, House Oversight, Budget, Government Reform, perhaps Judiciary, if necessary. So the bill we bring to the Floor will undergo several adjustments, and I fully expect reductions will be made along the way.

BUDGET EVALUATION

Over the past 2 years in the 104th Congress, legislative spending has been reduced by $225 million below the level of operations in fiscal year 1995. That was not an easy task because these programs are important and we must have an effective legislative branch to carry out the checks and balances required by our Constitution.

So, we must fund these programs, the staff and resources necessary to conduct the legislative business of the House and Senate, the maintenance of our physical plant, the research staff, and the auditors. Our basic responsibility in this appropriations bill is to make sure we provide the resources necessary to carry out those duties.

But we must also be cost-effective. We must isolate what is necessary from what is merely desirable or even of marginal value in our programs. The Congress has shown that it can reduce its own budget and not sacrifice fundamental capabilities. Resources and staff have been reduced, some programs were eliminated where possible, and the private sector has filled the gaps, to some extent, when feasible.

Since I am new to the subcommittee, as are several of my colleagues, I will reserve judgment on prospective increases and decreases. We will proceed through these hearings and examine the budget in detail, and the subcommittee will keep an open mind on the level of funding necessary for fiscal year 1998.

So the requests will be treated just that way. They are just requests, and the subcommittee will listen carefully and evaluate each agency's budget. I know each Member of the subcommittee will join in that effort.

Lastly, before I turn it over to Mr. Serrano for an opening statement, I would just like to say for those of you who do not know this, this is the Brumidi Room, the first room of the Capitol that was painted about 1860. The gentleman received $3,700 for this job. I can't imagine what it would be in today's dollars, but there is a sense of history in the room, and I hope that this committee continues not necessarily to make history, but at least to be recorded in history as having done the right job.

Mr. Serrano.

MR. SERRANO'S STATEMENT

you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. SERRANO. Thank

First of all, let me congratulate you on your Chairmanship of this committee.

Mr. WALSH. Thank you.

Mr. SERRANO. We will have the House Historian look to see the last time that two Members of the New York delegation headed a committee on both sides at the same time.