OMB calls for end to printing office monopoly

Federal agencies shouldn't have to use the Government Printing Office for printing services, President Bush's budget director said in a memorandum issued late last week. In a resurrection of previous administrations' efforts, Office of Management and Budget Director Mitch Daniels said he will ask the government's procurement policy council to let agencies buy printing services without going through the GPO. "The time has come for the executive branch to liberate its agencies from a monopoly that unfairly penalizes both taxpayers and efficient would-be competitors," Daniels wrote in the memo, which was released Friday. Under current federal procurement policy, agencies have to contract most printing work through the GPO. The printing office handled about $550 million worth of federal agencies' printing and copying jobs in fiscal 2001, the Daniels memo said. GPO contracts out about 84 percent of that work to private printers. The agency includes a 7 percent to 14 percent surcharge plus other fees that cost the executive branch $50 million to $70 million a year, Daniels said. The GPO monopoly is set in federal law, but Daniels said a 1996 Justice Department opinion found that Congress couldn't force executive branch agencies to use GPO. Daniels' plan to end GPO's monopoly through the executive branch's procurement council could ignite a fight with legislative branch supporters of the printing office. Andrew Sherman, a GPO spokesman, said ending the current printing rule could actually increase the cost of printing because agencies wouldn't be able to negotiate the same low prices that GPO gets from printing companies-and because procurement offices throughout government would be duplicating each other's efforts. The public's access to government information would also be cut, because agencies would be less likely to forward their documents to the printing office for distribution to public libraries, Sherman said. "When government printing is balkanized throughout government, distributing documents to depository libraries can be very expensive, if it's done at all," Sherman said. President Reagan tried to end the GPO's monopoly in 1988. Vice President Al Gore's National Performance Review recommended the move in 1994. Both efforts fizzled under legislative branch scrutiny. Ben Cooper, a spokesman for Printing Industries of America, an Alexandria, Va.-based trade association, said printers generally support the existing system, in part because the GPO ensures that printing firms throughout the country have a chance to compete for the government's business. Cooper also questioned whether the government would save money by ending the monopoly. "GPO charges fees that most printers would agree are rock-bottom," Cooper said. Daniels' memo would allow agencies to use GPO services if they were the cheapest available. Under his proposal, OMB would require agencies to submit annual reports showing the costs of work performed by GPO, by in-house printers and by printers with whom agencies contracted directly. A 1998 report by Booz Allen and Hamilton, a private consulting firm under contract to the General Accounting Office, found "universal support" in the executive branch for the GPO's services. "These agencies viewed this service that GPO provides as an example of 'government at its best,' and none of them felt that they wanted to or could do this function better than GPO," the report said.