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Lawmaker Would Curb Excess Deliveries of Federal Register on the Hill
CBO says bill would save $1 million annually.
If more Members of Congress embraced the digital revolution, the drop in the government’s printing bills would be, well, substantial, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
The legislative scorekeepers on Wednesday weighed in with an estimate on a bill (H.R. 195) by Rep. Steve Russell, R-Okla., that would forbid the Government Publishing Office from automatically dropping off early-morning print copies of the daily Federal Register to every member of Congress.
The Federal Register Printing Savings Act, which cleared the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Feb. 14, would deny members hard copies of the “official gazette of the United States Government” unless they specifically renew their annual subscription.
At $929 a year for the general public, subscriptions now given free to lawmakers—calculated at $4.50 per copy of an average 300-page edition—cost about $1 million, CBO figured, assuming that about 1,000 would no longer be printed under the “opt in” requirement for members who need their fix of new rules, proposed rules and other nuts and bolts of agency action. It’s unclear how CBO arrived at its estimate, however, because GPO reports that about 1,200 copies are printed daily, of which 400 copies go to Congress.
“Most of these printed copies end up in the trash because the Register is online and can be searched as a database,” Russell said last fall in a release. Members could “still request to receive a hard copy by exception, and a small number of hard copies of each Federal Register will still be printed and maintained for archival purposes.”
Jim Hemphill, special assistant to the director of the Federal Register, told Government Executive that the bill appears to simply require members who want hard copies to re-up every year, he said.
Federal Register staff, meanwhile, continue their work in digitizing pre-electronic issues of the daily editions from 1936 to 1994. Last March, they announced they had digitized more than 15,376 issues, indexes, and codification guidelines, contained within 299 boxes. An additional 105 replacement issue copies had been found and prepared for digitization.