Out of Print

he Government Printing Office, hunkered down in a massive New Deal-era structure on a Washington site it has occupied since the Civil War, is often viewed as a living symbol of centralized, bureaucratic government. Public Printer Michael F. DiMario, the head of GPO, finds the perception more than a little frustrating.

"We sit here in this great big old red brick building, and our workforce is a blue-collar workforce, a good part of it," says DiMario. "Today if you don't have a suit and tie on and you don't sit in a chalk-white building, you're seen as obsolete, a dinosaur."

As often as GPO is called a dinosaur it is called an octopus, reaching into agency decisions on what gets printed, when, where, how and for how much. GPO, which is officially an arm of Congress, is by law the mandatory first stop executive branch agencies must make for most of their printing jobs, and is the primary distributor of those documents to the public. GPO's reach has been shortening in recent years, though. In 1993, the first report of the National Performance Review recommended the enactment of legislation to "give the executive branch authority to make its own printing policy that will eliminate GPO as a mandatory printing service." While that hasn't happened, the report emboldened those who believe a centralized printing structure runs counter to the trend toward devolving procurement and other decisions to lower levels.

Requirements for agencies to go through GPO for their printing work have been eroding. Some agencies with heavy printing volumes-such as the Postal Service, the Defense Department and the IRS-are specifically exempt from the requirement to go first to GPO. Over the years, many other waivers also have been granted allowing other agencies to do their own printing or to contract directly with commercial printers on certain types of jobs. The number of such waivers is unknown, but is believed to run into the hundreds.

And where waivers don't exist, GPO's authority was weakened by a May 1996 Justice Department legal opinion stating that legislative branch control over executive branch activities raises constitutional separation of powers concerns.

Meanwhile, relatively low-cost desktop publishing systems, coupled with advanced photocopying and collating equipment, have brought sophisticated in-house printing capabilities within the budgets of more federal offices. No one is sure how many offices operate their own printing operations, but all sides agree the number is significant and growing.

Sen. John Warner, R-Va., until this year chairman of the Joint Committee on Printing (JCP)-which oversees and traditionally strongly supports GPO-thinks the decentralization of printing operations has gone too far. Last year, he proposed legislation to reaffirm the agency's central role. The bill, which may be reintroduced in this session of Congress, cleared the Senate Rules Committee late in the last congressional session but did not reach the Senate floor.

Warner's proposal would have revoked all waivers of the requirement that agencies use GPO and would have set new rules for issuing such waivers. It also would have required agencies to produce plans for reducing their in-house printing capacity over five years and to route all documents, no matter where produced, through GPO to the depositary library system. Under Warner's bill, GPO also would have become an independent agency, renamed the Government Publications Office to make clear that it had authority over electronic documents as well as paper ones.

"What we basically have in the federal government is an overcapacity of printing equipment and that's across the board," says Eric Peterson, staff director of the JCP under Warner. "One of the interests of [Warner's] legislation was to reduce that capacity with the view to contracting out as much of it as possible." He notes that while individual agencies are doing more of their printing in-house, GPO is doing less. GPO itself prints only about a fifth of the work orders it receives and contracts out the rest.

Quality Complaints

Many agency managers, however, think government needs more, not less, decentralization of printing authority. "We've been unhappy for years with the requirement that we go through GPO," says an official at a small agency office responsible for making sure that about a half-dozen reports get printed each year. "It takes us usually a minimum of 30 days to get something printed [at GPO]. We do not know in advance what our cost is going to be. We'd also like to keep some quality control of this process. We prefer to do a press inspection before they actually print. One of our staff will run out to the printer if it's local, but if it's not, we just have to keep our fingers crossed."

"We're supposed to be an entrepreneurial government," the official adds. "I'm convinced personally that I could go down to one of our local printers and establish a relationship and end up having my stuff printed at lower expense than what I end up with by going through the GPO process. I cannot do that and it's very frustrating."

This manager says the quality of GPO's work usually is acceptable, but not always. Once, for example, he got a report back with a footprint stamped on one page.

"That doesn't happen often, but GPO's only response is, 'File a complaint and we can take [the printer] off the list [of approved printers].' We can ask them to rerun it, but that costs more and you're not sure when you're going to get the thing," he says.

GPO officials say that given the volume of work the agency prints or has printed under contract, some problems are unavoidable. But they defend the quality of the work overall and note that GPO has a quality assurance system based on standards set for each job. Agencies sometimes expect a higher level of work than they choose to pay for, they say.

"I think that the performance is much more substantial than we're given credit for," says DiMario, who has been with GPO since 1971 in a variety of positions. "We get blamed for deficiencies that contractors may perform. But if the contractor meets the specification, you can't reject it. Sometimes an agency will accept a product because it needs it at a particular time even if it doesn't meet the specification. To turn around later and use it in an anecdotal way seems to me unfair."

Jim Bradley, GPO's director of customer service, says the agency often serves as a convenient scapegoat and the process of procuring printing services isn't as simple as it sounds. "You can go down the street and buy from a printer, that's true," he says. "But if you make a wrong decision on paper, for example, you double the price of the job. You've got to have some knowledge of what you get and how quick you get it. Sometimes very simple decisions make a big difference." In some cases, when agencies contract for work directly and later ask GPO for technical assistance, GPO discovers the job could be done for much less with minor changes in paper, color requirements or schedule, he says.

GPO has a ready supply of examples of agencies overpaying or getting poor-quality work when they contract or print on their own. GPO officials also have compiled a series of studies by congressional and executive branch auditors concluding that the economies of scale make centralized printing more cost-effective.

Dividing the Work

Just how much the government spends on printing has become difficult to determine as new equipment blurs the line between photocopying and traditional printing. The government budget account labeled "printing and reproduction" is around $2 billion yearly, but under GPO's method of accounting the actual amount is closer to $1.3 billion, and under yet another interpretation, by the Office of Management and Budget, the figure is about $1 billion.

There's general agreement, though, that GPO handles about 60 percent of the printing total, agencies do about 30 percent in-house and the rest is produced through cross-servicing or direct contracting arrangements. Two decades ago, GPO contracted out about half of the procurement orders coming in and printed the other half itself. But since then, the agency's staff has been cut from 8,500 employees to 3,400. Now GPO contracts with about 3,000 private printers for about four-fifths of the work orders it receives.

The most comprehensive recent look at printing costs, produced by a Clinton administration working group early in 1998, found that government printing practices "make economic sense overall. Agencies are procuring, generally through GPO, the large, complicated jobs that are more cost effectively produced by commercial sources, and are producing small and immediate-need duplicating jobs in-house, along with the jobs for sensitive information. The small, uncomplicated jobs are more cost effectively produced in-house."

GPO officials say such reports show that the agency does not have the monopolistic printing power that critics say it does. A monopolistic organization, they argue, would control far more of its market than GPO does and would not farm out the large majority of what it does control. Nor would it allow agencies that go through its procurement system to deal directly with the printers who won the contracts, as GPO does in one of its procurement options.

GPO officials also reject insinuations that the agency hasn't kept pace in the information age, pointing out that GPO was an early user of technologies such as fiber optics, electronic distribution, CD-ROMs and computer text formatting languages. The agency has automated its procurement system and the GPO Access Web site (www.
access.gpo.gov), which has about 100,000 posted documents that are downloaded 15 million times a month, making it one of the government's most-visited sites.

Under such circumstances, it appears that support for the Clinton administration's goal of decentralizing federal printing has subsided. A report issued last year by Booz-Allen and Hamilton under contract with the General Accounting Office found that "from the customer perspective, there appears to be little support for eliminating GPO. There is, however, a strong desire on the part of customers to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the organization."

Now, even administration officials give the GPO at least limited praise. "We think that the GPO has a strong role in government printing. It's a good central source for lots of different documents-the Congressional Record, judicial opinions and much of the printing the agencies do. We also believe they've been a strong force for dissemination," says G. Edward DeSeve, OMB's deputy director for management, who oversees federal information management efforts. "We think that we have an equilibrium between GPO printing and agency printing that respects the need for centralization of many kinds of printing, but where GPO has also recognized the need to provide waivers to many agencies to do their own printing."

The overall push to move government decision-making authority to lower levels has encouraged the waiver trend. At the same time, printing equipment has become available that sells for as little as $250,000-although service contracts, maintenance and other expenses can push costs much higher. Such equipment holds the promise of getting the work done right down the hall, more quickly and with less red tape. Manufacturers of such equipment-Xerox is the largest-have a strong interest in decentralized printing.

"The more agencies have moved into technology, sellers of technology have created the impression that everybody can do desktop publishing," says DiMario. "It's simple; here's a little kit and you can go out and do it. That really is just not true. The desktop technology, if used by a professional, can be an enormous time-saver and advance the ability to output very high quality products. But there is this element of the amateur now viewing himself as a professional because of the technology that's there. You can do a lot as an individual but you cannot output the same kind of high-quality products that are out there through the printing community."

An executive branch official with long experience in printing policy says agencies are buying equipment in quantities and with features they don't need. "[Most agencies] don't need 50 pieces of equipment," the official says. "There's a lack of management."

Bradley says he's aware of several cases where agencies have overbought. "Somebody should step back and say, 'Do you really need this? What do you need it for? If this is one item that comes up every six months, let's find a way to get it done [elsewhere],' " he says. GPO itself maintains much more printing capacity than it usually needs, however. Jobs for Congress, such as bills, committee reports and other documents, account for just under half of the printing GPO does in-house.

But GPO must also be able to handle large rush jobs-the report of independent counsel Kenneth Starr on President Clinton is only the most prominent recent example. When Congress is out of session, GPO needs to keep its people and equipment busy by doing work for executive agencies.

Fugitive Documents

While there may be disagreements over whether agencies' purchasing decisions are wise-no specific study of that issue has been conducted-all sides agree that the growth of agency-controlled printing has resulted in fewer documents making their way into public dissemination channels. Warner and others argue GPO's control over these "fugitive" documents must be strengthened.

Increasingly, agencies are electronically storing and publishing documents that used to be available only in hard copy. While this trend has cut costs and speeded up the publishing of documents in many cases, rapid changes in technology have left the government lacking standards to make information available to the public in a consistent way.

Another problem is that information produced only in electronic form can be lost forever when someone decides, for example, to streamline or clean up a Web site. The American Association of Law Libraries has compiled a list of some 70 publications from about 30 agencies that previously were posted on the Internet but are no longer available, with no record of whether the information was updated or simply wiped out.

But the dissemination problem isn't limited to electronic publishing, says Robert L. Oakley, library director of the Georgetown University Law Center and Washington affairs representative of the law libraries association. "Once [agencies] go outside the normal production chain, the information product they produce doesn't get into the hands of libraries and therefore into the hands of the American people," he says. "I don't want to suggest that they're doing it on purpose. It falls through the cracks. That's not their primary focus, getting these things into the hands of libraries, whereas with the depository library program, that is their focus."

OMB's DeSeve acknowledges that the agency has received "anecdotal information from librarians and others that when the agencies do printing or what might be called printing that it's not getting to the libraries. That's not what we want. We want the libraries to be the primary distribution mechanisms for electronic documents and print documents."

The administration and Congress currently are reviewing these and other issues in light of the failure of Warner's bill to pass in 1998. The measure's future is uncertain. Warner has rotated out as chairman of the JCP and another key advocate of GPO, Sen. Wendell Ford, D-Ky., has retired. Another attempt at least to fix the separation of powers problem seems likely, officials say, but the scope of other initiatives remains to be seen.

Whatever happens legislatively, at GPO headquarters officials are preparing to defend themselves once again. "My perception is that there are people who have their own interests they're attempting to advance, so they're motivated to advance negative claims about GPO. I think that's true both in the private sector and internally in government," says DiMario. "Some [inside government] perceive they ought to be able to do what we do. In the private sector there are vendors who do not like a centralized structure, because it goes against their ability to sell equipment.

"This is an agency that's hammered on the head from the outside," he adds. "You have to look at the motivation of the people hammering."

Eric Yoder is a Washington-area freelance journalist who has covered the federal government for 17 years.