7 1 Resident Commissioners, Federal department and agency 2 officials, State and local officials, and to local repositories 3 as determined by the President or his delegated representa4 tive. 5 (b) The catalog shall be the single authoritative, Gov6 ernment-wide compendium of Federal domestic assistance 7 program information produced by a Federal agency or 8 department. Specialized catalogs for specific ad hoc purposes 9 may be developed within the framework, or as a supple10 ment to, the Government-wide compendium and shall be 11 allowed only when specifically authorized and developed 12 within guidelines and criteria to be determined by the 13 President. 14 (c) Any existing provisions of law requiring the prep15 aration or publication of such catalogs are superseded to the 16 extent they may be in conflict with the provisions of this 17 Act. 18 DELEGATION OF FUNCTIONS 19 SEC. 10. The President may delegate any function con20 ferred upon him by this Act including preparation and dis21 tribution of the catalog, to the head of any Federal depart22 ment or agency, with authority for redelegation as he may 23 deem appropriate. Mr. BLATNIK. Mr. Roth, would you take the stand and begin the hearings this morning? STATEMENT OF HON. WILLIAM V. ROTH, JR., A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF DELAWARE Mr. ROTH. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, if I may, rather than reading my official statement-which I would appreciate having incorporated as part of the record-I would like to briefly outline what the legislation is about and why I hope it will be enacted. Mr. BLATNIK. Without objection your statement will appear in its entirety in the record and you may proceed at will to give emphasis, underscore, or call attention to those aspects of your proposal which you feel need further elaboration. Mr. ROTH. First of all, I would like to say that I thank the chairman for holding these hearings. I recognize the great burden of work you have with a number of other organizational matters before your committee. Basically, what we are talking about today is a very simple concept to fill what I think is a very basic need-that is, to provide meaningful information in a readily available form to help those whom the various Federal assistance programs are designed to help. The Program Information Act would require the President to publish a catalog each year by May 1, to be updated on at least a quarterly basis. The legislation sets forth certain basic elements that should be incorporated in this catalog. I will mention them very briefly, but I think it is important to first note that the primary purpose is to give the kind of information that is necessary to help the potential beneficiary or to help the local and State officials back home who are responsible for making applications. The kinds of information we require to be incorporated under this legislation would include, of course, the identity of the program, a brief description, and the eligibility requirements. All this is meaningful to the individuals who have to determine whether or not they are eligible or can become eligible. In addition, we have found that one of the areas of greatest concern-the area creating the greatest problems for our constituents-has been the lack of adequate financial information about Federal programs. Consequently, the proposed legislation does require that certain basic financial information be supplied, and hopefully, as time moves on, more complete financial information than is now possible under present accounting procedures will be included. To continue, we would require the description of each program in the catalog to incorporate such additional information as what the application procedures are and, perhaps more important, identify related programs. I have found that one of the things that have most concerned the people back home, as well as my colleagues in the Congress, is that very often in the past it has been extremely difficult to identify related programs. This is a service that I think will be very helpful to those who use the catalog. Mr. Chairman, I think the need for adequate information is now pretty clear cut. I will suggest very briefly, if I might, why I think there has been what I have called in the past an information crisis. My interest in this matter started back in 1966 when I made a survey of Delaware attempting to find out from local officials, school administrators, and so on, what problems they were having, if any, with Federal assistance programs. It soon became clear that one of the critical problems was adequate information. Coming to Washington, I soon learned that nowhere in the executive branch of the Government was there a compilation of all Federal programs. And, as I have outlined in earlier speeches-and I shall not go through this againto fill this gap we made an 8-month study in an effort to compile a comprehensive compendium of all assistance programs. One of my basic concerns is that this lack of adequate information hurts most those whom we are trying to help the most. In other words, it's the small colleges, the small communities, smaller schools, smaller States and smaller counties that have suffered the greatest from the lack of adequate information. We have found that large universities have developed entire libraries in Washington whose principal purpose is to find out where the assistance is. This has given them a tremendous advantage in contrast to the smaller organizations that cannot afford to do the same. I would like to, if I might, make one quote. It's a quote of the National Association of County Administrators, which says that "The vastness of the Federal aid 'administrative jungle' reflects the urgency of developing an information system to keep local leaders and administrators informed so they can fulfill their responsibilities." As a matter of fact, NACO goes on and recommends, for example, that every county have at least one person whose principal activity would be to develop such information. I think this gives you some idea of the magnitude of the information need, because this alone would mean that there would have to be 3,000 different information officers in the counties and, by extrapolation, 18,000 in the municipalities, all doing the same thing. In addition, we have something like 25,000 different school districts and 2,500 institutions of higher learning. All of these need adequate information on Federal assistance programs as well. Mr. BLATNIK. Would the gentleman yield at that point? Mr. BLATNIK. It's a good point you have made. We have a good relationship with the Association of County Officials; the Council of State Governments, and the National Association of Counties. They have been very active with us in many programs-area development, community facilities-to help the smaller communities. Many of these programs would fall under the heading of "Ways to Improve the Quality of Life." On these occasions it is most difficult to find where they can get help. But once you find an agency it is absolutely inexcusable and pathetic or incredible-whatever word you want to use-that you can't get something going. I can name specific cases over and over again where these little county officials are supposed to run to Chicago to the headquarters for information on urban renewal or to get information on small community projects or sewer projects, or whatever it might be. They are running back and forth. They may have a small hospital application or housing for the aged application, in these small counties, and they have to go through almost the same procedure for a $400,000 project that the city of Minneapolis has to go through with a population of half a million with staffed engineers, planning commissions, and so forth. For instance, they have to have a survey by some specialist to show there was no other housing for the elderly available within a 50-mile radius; so they go out in their cars and count the number of motels that are around there. I have gone through the records and it's pathetic. The same procedures as the city of Minneapolis goes through, they all go through-even if it is for an $8,000 project. It would be like asking the average wage earner who gets $8,000 a year to fill out a long income tax form, as do the corporations or for someone with a much higher income. I think your proposition could be the step of a very important clarification which I think would greatly reduce the waste, inefficiency, duplication, and time-consuming processes of this multiplicity of bureaucratic operations. Every one of these programs such as we have mentioned does have someone in charge, somebody fighting paper, somebody asking for more paperwork. It's incredible the papers that need to be filled out. I have been in counties in the small municipalities, say, of 2,000 people, where the sole person under the county clerk would be one little stenographer who was expected to fill out long, complicated forms with which they had had no previous experience. They had no money to hire consultants and this other needless stuff. So I had to physically go to Chicago and meet with them and chase some of their people out into the field. There might have been 10 or 15 applications from relatively near areas in northern Wisconsin, northern Minnesota, or northern Michigan. I had them send one or two of their top people who know about these forms into the field to do more work rather than have letters bouncing back and forth-and it takes 18 months to complete a simple application. I am sorry I took so much of your time but this problem you pointed out is much more onerous, burdensome and frustrative than one would think. Once you find the agency then their greatest troubles have just begun. Mr. ROTH. There is no question but that is the situation. What you said reflects exactly the experiences I have had in the smaller counties of my State. And, of course, what we are proposing here is only a first or preliminary step to help correct this situation. I have likewise found that one of the problems of our smaller counties is that they do not have the personnel with the time or background to understand the many complicated requirements of Federal programs. Many times, therefore, they have to go out and hire expensive consultants or planners in order to prepare applications. Too often there are different requirements under related programs which only complicate the problem from the point of view of the small county. One of the great tragedies is that the delay caused by these requirements has a threefold effect. First of all, it increases costs for the county or local unit. Second, it is a great drag on what personnel the county has available. Finally, the time spent processing the grant could be much better spent in solving the problem. But it seems to me that the first step and a step that would help simplify the Federal aid delivery system from the point of view of these small counties is to provide one source they could turn to for a description of all Federal programs. That is all this catalog really is about; it puts potential recipients on notice where aid may be available and it gives them meaningful information for each of the programs to enable them to determine whether or not a program offers the kind of help they need. Mr. BLATNIK. By the way, would you mind if we included in that idea parenthetically, that the instructions coming along as to where the program is and where to go, that the bureaucrats write it in plain English? Mr. ROTH. The point you raise, Mr. Chairman, is a very important one. Mr. BLATNIK. I have had letters that I read and reread-and I must say I am far from the best in English but I can read a newspaper-and I didn't know what it said. Mr. ROTH. One of the problems that was identified in the study by the Midwest Research Institute for HUD and something that we found out in our own case has been that there are too many pamphlets and catalogs which use different language for the same things. They are not standardized as to terminology, so you not only have a problem of not having one source but you have a problem of such an abundance of pamphlets and catalogs that none of them answer the basic need of one simple catalog in simple English that will be understandable by the people actually applying for the program itself. As a matter of fact, in section 7(c) of our proposed legislation we have covered this point that you hit upon by saying that "*** The catalog shall be in all respects concise, clear, understandable, and such that it can be easily understood by the potential beneficiary." Mr. BLATNIK. Good. Mr. ROTH. And I think the fact that we provided in this legislation for one catalog will help to standardize and simplify the language problem. From that standpoint, the recent OEO effort leaves much to be desired. Mr. Chairman, I do think good progress has been made in this area. OEO originally was given responsibility for developing an overview of Federal programs; our eight-month study-and I don't want to go into detail-shows their original efforts were not adequate. For example, their 1967 catalog only outlined something like 459 programs; our study shows there were at least 1050. Their 1969 catalog included 581; and ours included 1315. One thing I want to make clear, I am not involved in a numbers game. There are many ways you can "slice the baloney", if you want to put it that way. The important thing is to break down the programs in an understandable manner so they are visible to the fellow back home who is to apply for the program. One of the problems with OEO's earlier efforts was that they consolidated information about several programs into one program, making it meaningless to the applicants. I am happy to say that that last effort, the 1970 catalog, made great improvement. It showed that- Mr. BLATNIK. Which one are you referring to, the loose-leaf catalog? Mr. ROTH. Yes, the 1970 OEO looseleaf catalog, that's correct. This catalog has incorporated many of the proposals we have included in our legislation and I want to compliment the OEO and the then Bureau 48-957 0-70- -3 |