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LEGISLATIVE BRANCH APPROPRIATIONS FOR

FISCAL YEAR 1996

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 2, 1995

U.S. SENATE,

SUBCOMMITTEE OF THE COMMITTEE ON APPROPRIATIONS,

Washington, DC.

The subcommittee met at 10 a.m., in joint session with the House subcommittee, in room H-144, the Capitol, Hon. Ron Packard (chairman) presiding.

Present: Representatives Packard, Taylor, Miller, Wicker, Fazio, Thornton, and Dixon, and Senators Mack, Bennett, Jeffords, and Murray.

Also present: Representative Hoyer.

NONDEPARTMENTAL WITNESSES

DOWNSIZING LEGISLATIVE BRANCH SUPPORT AGENCIES

STATEMENT OF JOSEPH R. WRIGHT, JR., CORPORATE EXECUTIVE AND DIRECTOR, TRAVELERS INC., FORMER DIRECTOR OF OFFICE OF MANAGEMENT AND BUDGET

Mr. PACKARD. Ladies and gentlemen, we would like to begin. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. We want to welcome you to this hearing. We will be starting our hearings on time. I have attended enough hearings in my career that have started significantly late that I have decided that if I ever had the chance, we would begin our hearings on time. We would like to start that way this morning, and we are.

This is a joint hearing, and the purpose is to receive testimony that will give us assistance in downsizing the legislative branch and its support agencies. We intend to go until 12 noon. Then we will begin again at 2 p.m. and go to 4 o'clock. We would like to wrap up the hearing by 4 o'clock.

This is the subcommittee's first hearing of the 104th Congress. It is, as I mentioned, a joint hearing with members of the Subcommittee on Legislative Branch appropriations on the Senate side. They have joined us, and we have with us my very good friend and classmate, we came to Congress together, the Honorable Connie Mack, chairman of the Senate subcommittee. We are looking forward to working with him and with his subcommittee in doing our job this year.

Before we begin, I would like to introduce the members of our subcommittee on the House side. Myself, Ron Packard as chairman, and we have at the moment Dan Miller with us, from Florida.

He is a second-term member, his first year on this subcommittee. We are very pleased to have you with us, Dan.

And, Senator, would you like to introduce your members?

Senator MACK. Well, at this point there are no members from the Senate side here, so that makes it fairly easy.

Mr. THORNTON. Mr. Chairman, I am here from our side.

Mr. PACKARD. On the other side of the table is Ray Thornton, from Arkansas. We are glad to have Ray with us. We will be joined, I am sure, later by other members off and on. Vic Fazio has been the chairman of this subcommittee over the last several years, and he will be joining us. He is the ranking minority member of the subcommittee.

I presume also later on we will be joined by full committee chairman, Bob Livingston, from Louisiana.

I want to welcome the witnesses that are here today. We are truly grateful that you have accepted the invitation to come before our subcommittee. This is a historic opportunity for us.

For the first time in 40 years, the House subcommittee will have a different majority. We believe there is great opportunity to reach a more effective and efficient way of operating the legislative branch of Government. We have been given a clear signal by the voters, we believe, that Government must be downsized, and that is something we intend to do. And that certainly will include the legislative branch of Government.

Some of these efficiencies can be achieved right here by action that we take in the appropriations process. Others will require the enactment of new and amended authorizing legislation. But we must recognize that there are several committees who have legislative jurisdiction over many of the programs in the legislative bill. For example, the Committee on House Oversight authorizes many of the House items.

The Government Printing Office, as well as portions of the Library of Congress, fall into that authorizing committee. We also have a Committee on Government Reform and Oversight and GAO comes under their jurisdiction. The Rules and Budget Committees have jurisdiction over CBO and other legislative oversight responsibilities. The Committee on Science has jurisdiction over OTA. The Judiciary Committee over the Copyrights Office and the National Film Preservation Program; and the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee has authorizing jurisdiction over the Architect of the Capitol construction projects. And, of course, the Joint Committee on Printing conducts management oversight with respect to GPO and its programs.

So we can't do it all on the Appropriations Committees. We can, however, reduce and adjust the funding levels in the appropriation bills. But changes in statutory mission or transferring functions to appropriate agencies requires the enactment of authorizing legislation. The authorizers have to enact appropriate legislation for us to do the changes that we want to do, and we are going to be working with them; we have already met with several of them. We intend to meet with all of them to make certain that there is a smooth transition as we make these changes that we sense are imminent upon us.

We are looking forward to this year. We sense that this sub committee is going to be a major part of the huge changes that are taking place in Government and in how Government operates. We are looking forward to this opportunity.

I am extremely grateful to have the privilege of working with Senator Mack. We have had a long relationship and this is going to enhance that relationship. I would like to turn, if I could, to you. Senator, for any opening statement that you would like to make.

STATEMENT OF SENATOR CONNIE MACK

Senator MACK. Well, thank you, Mr. Chairman. And I, too, look forward to working with you. We have already had the opportunity to meet together and talk about the direction that we are headed, and I look forward to these next couple of years working with you on this committee. I think there is a lot to do. You each know the size of the budget is not huge by any stretch of the imagination with respect to other subcommittee budgets on the Appropriations Committee. But it is an important one.

I understand that we are making a little bit of history here today: the first joint hearings held by an Appropriations Committee. But fresh in my mind is the history made by the American people last November. The American people sent a clear and unmistakable message when they sent the new majority to Congress. This new majority has an equally clear and unmistakable mission: Reduce the size, the scope, and the cost of the Federal Government; return to the American people control over their own lives.

While the appropriations bill reported by the Legislative Branch Subcommittee is the smallest in terms of dollars, this year takes on symbolic importance for this simple reason. If Congress is going to make the necessary reductions to the entire Federal Government and return to fiscal sanity, if Congress is going to mandate that executive departments and agencies become more focused and efficient, and if Congress is going to return to the American people control of their lives, then Congress must demonstrate the political will and leadership by putting its own house in order.

But putting Congress' house in order does not only mean a simple reduction in budgets, it means taking a long and thoughtful look at the core mission and responsibility of each chamber and support agency. I am confident that this long overdue review will provide us with a once-in-a-generation opportunity to focus the entire institution on its primary legislative and oversight mission.

Our representative committees will be exploring ways to use technologies to make Congress more efficient and responsive. We will look for opportunities to privatize a variety of operations currently being conducted by congressional agencies; we will consolidate redundant functions being performed by two, three, sometimes four separate offices. We will eliminate some operations altogether. Let me just make one additional comment here. Some may conclude that this is a partisan statement; it is not meant to be at all. I think any institution that is controlled by one thought or one entity for 40 years has a tendency to keep doing the same thing or expanding in a similar direction. I think in this past 40 years that somehow the Congress has come to the conclusion that it is a second executive and, therefore, we have established a number of

functions in the legislative branch that, in fact, are executive in nature.

And so as we go through this process, we are going to try to again focus the Congress on its legislative responsibilities, not its executive, which I think, in fact, has been developed over the last 40 years. So it is from that perspective that I am going to be looking at a number of the different functions that are carried out under our jurisdiction.

There are many policy issues to be debated. There are many ways to get where we want to go. And it is not going to be easy. But the bottom line is we must put this House and the Senate in order to do the job the American people sent us here to do.

I look forward to working with you again, Chairman Packard, as we served together when I represented the 13th district of Florida, and I see my friend Dan Miller who now represents part of that 13th district. I also look forward to working with the other House committee members and ranking member from the Senate, Senator Patty Murray, and we have had an opportunity also to talk about the general direction and to express to each other our desires to work together. And I also look forward to working with Senators Bennett, Jeffords, and Mikulski.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. PACKARD. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. As I mentioned earlier, I was sure the chairman of the full committee would be here, the Honorable Bob Livingston from Louisiana.

Do you have any statements you would like to make, Bob? We would appreciate it.

STATEMENT OF BOB LIVINGSTON

Mr. LIVINGSTON. Well, Mr. Chairman, only in the interest of the demands from the other subcommittees, I would, if you don't mind. I just, first of all, want to congratulate you. I haven't had a chance to officially congratulate you on your subcommittee responsibilities as chairman of this subcommittee and I look forward to working with you in my capacity as one member of the subcommittee. And I also congratulate and look forward to working with our friend, Senator Connie Mack, your counterpart, and welcome Senator Murray to the House side. You are slumming, but we are glad to have you.

But I am very interested in the responsibilities of this subcommittee and one particular instance because it just seems that it was a gentleman by the name of Joseph R. Wright, Jr, the first witness before the subcommittee who, when he was Deputy Director of OMB developed a program called Reform 1988. That program aimed to consolidate much of the routine Federal administrative processes that all Federal agencies must perform, including payroll and personnel recordkeeping, inventory controls, general ledger accounting, travel records, management, and the like. The idea was to have a single entity or perhaps a few separate entities do this work.

The computer operations, the recordkeeping procedures, and the like were all of Government. And an excellent example of this program turns out to be the National Finance Center, coincidentally in New Orleans, LA, which does the work for many agencies, inclu

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