LEGISLATIVE BRANCH APPROPRIATIONS FOR FISCAL YEAR 1996 FRIDAY, MAY 12, 1995 U.S. SENATE, SUBCOMMITTEE OF THE COMMITTEE ON APPROPRIATIONS, Washington, DC. The subcommittee met at 10:15 a.m., in room SD-116, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. Connie Mack (chairman) presiding. Present: Senators Mack and Murray. U.S. SENATE OFFICE OF THE SECRETARY OF THE SENATE STATEMENT OF HON. SHEILA P. BURKE, SECRETARY OF THE SENATE NINA OVIEDO, ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF THE SENATE STATEMENT OF HON. CONNIE MACK Senator MACK. The hearing will now come to order. On behalf of the ranking member, Senator Murray, and the other members of the committee, I wish to welcome our witnesses and our guests this morning. This is the first hearing of the Legislative Branch Appropriations Subcommittee, which is considering the fiscal year 1996 appropriations bill which funds the operations of the Congress of the United States. In addition to the Senate and the House of Representatives, the bill funds the various congressional support agencies, which include the Architect of the Capitol and Botanical Gardens and the Congressional Budget Office, Copyright Royalty Tribunal, the Government Accounting Office, the Library of Congress and Congressional Research Service, and the Office of Technology Assessment. The budget we will be considering in our hearings totals $2.367 billion in fiscal year 1995. Of that amount, $728 million is for operations of the House of Representatives and is not considered by the Senate. This week, the Senate Budget Committee Chairman proposed a dramatic and necessary plan to produce a balanced budget within 7 years; a balanced budget for the entire Federal Government for the first time in many decades. The American people understand that the Federal Government is simply too big and spends too much, and last November they said enough is enough and demanded change. While this committee understands that the legisla tive branch of Government is but a small portion of the $1.5 trillion budget, we equally understand that Congress must demonstrate that we are serious about producing a balanced budget. Shortly after the November election, the Republican conference met and debated and adopted a resolution which recognized that the Congress must exercise leadership in controlling spending by reducing the legislative branch of Government. This is my mandate as chairman. While overall government spending is going to rise during that period, we are going to cut-yes, cut-legislative branch spending. And finally, before we begin today's hearings, I would like to point out to the committee and to those interested parties who may be watching on C-SPAN that today's witnesses representing the various offices of the Senate will present budgets which meet or exceed the leadership-mandated budget reductions of 12.5 percent. I congratulate each of them and their dedicated staffs. Again, I do want to underscore that. I realize that these are not easy times and that there is a lot that is being demanded of us. And I know that those of you at the table and those who are here observing-I understand the roles that you played. I know how difficult it has been. And I want you to know that we appreciate the efforts that you have made, and we will try to work with you as we try to achieve the goals that have been established as a result of the last election and by the actions of the conference. So, with that background, I look forward to your opening statement. We do have your prepared statement for the record, and however you would like to proceed, go right ahead. SECRETARY'S OPENING STATEMENT Ms. BURKE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. You will find in front of you, Mr. Chairman, a notebook prepared by our office that contains. my opening statement as well as documents relating to our budget, and the full statement prepared with all the details of our budget that you may want to refer to. Mr. Chairman, thank you for the opportunity to present our budget request. Joining me this morning at the table are Nina Oviedo, who is the Assistant Secretary, and Stuart Balderson who is the Financial Clerk of the Senate. Ray Strong and Scott McCullers are also with us and are going to be helping us with our computerized, new-age presentation. As you suggested early in the budget process, Mr. Chairman, we have conducted a thorough review of the operations of the Secretary. There are 24 distinct functions within the Office of the Secretary and over 200 employees. The review was very helpful one for us and we appreciate your encouragement to do it. It was helpful for a couple of reasons. One, obviously, in any transition, it is an excellent opportunity to talk with each of the departments and to talk about their unique functions in each of their offices, which is what Nina and I did. And I think it helped to smooth the transition and provided guidance for us in our budget review. Second, the review forced us to look beyond just the numbers. The easiest thing would have been, as you can imagine, to do simply an across-the-board reduction in the Secretary's Office. But, in fact, we have achieved our goal of 12.5 percent plus in our budget without cutting needed services to the Members and the public and without compromising our essential mission. I might also note that I honestly believe that the budget estimates that we will talk about today really understate the true savings that the institution has achieved as a result of the efforts of the staff of the Secretary. FUNCTIONS OF THE SECRETARY'S OFFICE Mr. Chairman, since my appointment, I have often been asked to explain the functions of the Office of the Secretary, and I thought it would be helpful this morning to give you a very brief review of what it is that we do. Senator MACK. And the reason I have a little bit of a grin is because that probably was my first question. So go right ahead. Ms. BURKE. Well, anticipating as we hope to do, we are going to give you a brief review of what the Secretary's Office actually does. HISTORICAL REVIEW I am the 27th Secretary of the Senate, the first having been chosen on April 8, 1789, 2 days after the Senate achieved its first quorum for business. From its initial creation and continuing with today's hearing and beyond, the Office has gone through some extraordinary changes in the breadth and complexity of its responsibilities, just as the institution has. But throughout it all, our mission has remained very much the same, and that is to expedite the daily operations of the Senate. In 1789, the Secretary was responsible for keeping the minutes and the records of the Senate and purchasing supplies. Secretary Otis, our first secretary, hand-wrote the original Senate Journal, a photograph of which you see before you. The first report of the Secretary, which was all of five pages, was not printed until 1823. And I found the entries particularly fascinating. There was a Tobias Simpson, a messenger in the Senate, who was paid $2 a day; the Secretary paid $388.44 for newspapers; and we spent about $69 on furniture repairs. SECRETARY'S ROLE TODAY Well, last year, my office spent alone on newspapers $45,000. And, of course, the report has changed as well. You will see it before you. And, in fact, that is a smaller version as a result of much of Stuart's work. It used to be two volumes; we have gotten it down to one. But it is still somewhere in excess of 1,400 pages. Today, of course, is a different world. In addition to the responsibilities of the disbursing office, the Secretary oversees the publication of the Senate Journal and the Congressional Record along with a variety of other documents. We oversee the Senate Page School, a multimillion dollar retail operation, and a first-rate floor staff. And, for a better understanding of the operations of the office, I want to take just a moment and introduce some of those talented individuals who help make our office what it is today. You probably find Scott Bates a familiar face. Scott is the Senate Legislative Clerk, the reading clerk of the Senate, who reads bills, resolutions, conference reports, minutes, and other material at the direction of the presiding officer. He has been with us since 1970. As Senate Bill Clerk, Kathie Alvarez is responsible for recording all of the actions of the Senate and keeping an authoritative historical record of our business. Also working under the Secretary is Ken Dean, the morning business editor. Ken's responsibility is for that portion of the Congressional Record consisting of morning business. And there are many others under the Secretary's Office who may not be as familiar to you but who are just as important when it comes to facilitating our day-to-day operations. Jean Manning, who is with me this morning, serves as the Senate Chief Counsel for Employment and provides legislative and legal advice to all the Senate offices on employment-management issues and defends offices that are sued by employees for employee discrimination. Steve Bale, the keeper of stationery, runs the merchandising outlet and acts as a purchasing agent for stationery supplies, maintains the inventories to meet the Senate office requirements. Jeanie Bowles, who is the last one I will note specifically, is the Superintendent of the document room which has maintained supplies of Senate documents and legislative publications for use by the Members, by the staff, by the executive branch, as well as the public. Jeanie, in fact, has been with the Senate since 1971 and is one of our most aggressive department heads in seeking ways to reduce our costs and become more user-friendly. These are just a few of our staff, and I believe their skills are crucial to the smooth operation of the Senate. As evidenced in the chart now before you and in your briefing books, our budget is largely made up of payroll costs, some 86.8 percent. Our administrative costs are approximately 13.2 percent. In seeking ways to both modernize and increase our efficiency we looked to both aspects of our budget. BUDGET REDUCTIONS In the budget we propose today, we reduced our payroll costs by 9.2 percent and reduced our expenses by 35.5 percent. This will result in a savings of $1,932,306; approximately 12.6 percent. While operating expenses are a relatively small portion of our budget, they receive the same level of scrutiny as our payroll. After a thorough evaluation, we found that we could reduce travel expenses, consulting fees, newspaper purchases, and miscellaneous administrative costs in almost every department. The savings projected with respect to contractual and legal expenses reflect our intention, with your approval, to increase the number of attorneys in the Office of the Senate Chief Counsel for Employment so we might do much of our legal work internally rather than contract it out. Planned changes in the organization and structure of the page school, which you will note on the chart before you, will also result in dramatic reductions in administrative costs. You will see an increase in payroll costs as we take on the responsibility of hiring our faculty directly, but the net cost of running the school will still be less. With respect to payroll, our reductions proposed reflect downsizing as well as an effort to put some downward pressure on cer tain salaries. Because so many of our departments are staffed with very few personnel, all of whom are essential, there is no dramatic reduction in the number of staff. But we are, through attrition, retirement, and job reorganization, trying to do our job smaller and smarter. As I noted earlier, our proposed budget would increase the percentage of our budget for payroll to 90.5 percent while still seeing a reduction in those costs of over $1 million. COST SAVINGS MEASURES In addition to our efforts with respect to our own payroll and operating expenses, our office has also initiated a number of other efforts to reduce the costs of operating the Senate. While they may not show on our balance sheet, they are, in fact, real savings. During 1994, we sought to stop the duplicate printing of amendments offered during debate. Amendments in excess of 25 pages are referenced at the time of the offer and printed one time only in the morning business section. We kept a running tally of the amendments referenced as a result of this activity, which resulted in a GPO estimated savings of $792,900. In 1994, the Joint Committee on Printing authorized GPO and the Secretary to conduct a pilot program during the first session of the 104th Congress. Title 44 of the US. Code, as I am sure you know, requires the Senate to print a specific number of bills and resolutions, usually several hundred copies, of every single item that is introduced. These guidelines were established icng before we had today's new communications, printing, and computing technologies, so we are printing a large number of documents that we never use. To give you an example of the magnitude of our proclem, at the end of the last two sessions of the previous congress we disposed of approximately 40 million pages of documents that were never used. ON-DEMAND PRINTING The Senate Service Department has supplied a Docutech printer to the Senate Document Room which is linked to the central GPO facility. When additional copies of a bill or a resolution are now requested, we can print them on demand on site and in the exact number of needed copies. It only takes 2 or 3 minutes to get to the machine, and it is capable of printing 136 pages a minute Earlier this year we surveyed the committee staff directors and determined that 50 copies will satisfy their needs. I have also proposed to the Joins Committee on Printing that we red ice the initial copies of printed documenta for the Senate Document Room. Thia suggestion will out the initial orders by approximately one-half of what we printed previously The superintendent of the document room, Jearle Bowles, and I feel that it is possible to prins enough cop es of ...a and resolutiona to meet the needs of the Senate using the printon demand printer and still show significant reductions in the number of documenta that are printed. You will find at the end of my testimony a lat of the statutory requirementa with reacent to pridiction and what reductions we have actua..y achieved as a result of the cooperation of the committees. |