SUPPORT AGENCIES THURSDAY, JUNE 10, 1993 UNITED STATES CONGRESS, JOINT COMMITTEE ON THE ORGANIZATION OF CONGRESS, Washington, DC. The committee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:16 a.m. in room SC-5, The Capitol, Hon. David Dreier (vice chairman of the committee) presiding. OPENING STATEMENT OF THE HON. DAVID DREIER, A U.S. Mr. DREIER. The Joint Committee on the Organization of Congress will come to order. This morning the Joint Committee will receive testimony about the support agencies that are part of the legislative branch and upon which Congress has come to rely for additional expertise. The distinguished panel of witnesses before us today includes the directors of each of the support agencies: First, we'll hear from Mr. Joseph Ross, Director of the Congressional Research Service; He will be followed by Charles Bowsher, the Comptroller General of the United States; Next will be Dr. Richard Herdman, the Office of the Director of the Office of Technology Assessment; After Dr. Herdman, we'll hear from Robert Reischauer, Director of the Congressional Budget Office; and The last witness will be Michael DiMario, the Acting Public Printer. The total appropriated funds for the Legislative Branch of the Federal Government can be divided roughly into quarters, approximately one-quarter pays the internal cost of the House, while another quarter pays the internal cost of the Senate. A third quarter is allocated to other activities also essential to the work of the legislative branch-the Architect of the Capitol, the Library of Congress, and the Government Printing Office. The last quarter goes to the four information support agenciesthe General Accounting Office, or GAO, the Congressional Research Service, or CRS, the Congressional Budget Office, or CBO, and the Office of Technology Assessment, or OTA. I'm glad we have acronyms for all of them, gentlemen. [Laughter.] Mr. DREIER. Today's hearing will focus mostly on this last quarter of legislative branch activity. The support agencies clearly represent an enormous reservoir of professional talent for the legisla tive branch. Together they include some 6,200 employees, of whom 2,800 have either master's degrees or doctorates. As we proceed with this hearing, however, there are several questions that we might keep in mind: First, are the missions of these agencies appropriately defined or is greater refinement of mission desirable? Second, are the support agencies of the appropriate size to perform their missions? Given the pressure on Congress to cut staff resources, the support agencies clearly will not be immune from such reductions. Third, are the capabilities and resources of the support agencies available on a reasonable equitable basis to a wide range of Members of Congress? Fourth, are there sufficient controls on the quality of professional work produced by the support agencies? Fifth, are there ways the support agencies might be reorganized so that their important missions are better fulfilled? I hope that each of the witnesses this morning will summarize their statements, and, since I've outlined what we would like from your testimony, you're all welcome to go back and rewrite it if you would like. [Laughter.] Mr. DREIER. Let's begin with Mr. Ross. STATEMENT OF MR. JOSEPH ROSS, DIRECTOR, CONGRESSIONAL RESEARCH SERVICE, THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS Mr. Ross. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would be pleased to summarize the statement. It is rather extensive. We tried to cover as much about our mission, how we do things, how we see the past as well as the present and the future, and, of course, or relationships with the other support agencies as well. I would like to emphasize three aspects of CRS that would be of interest to the Joint Committee: The kind of people that we have we have lawyers, and economists, and political scientists, and social scientists, engineers, people of expertise in all of the subject areas that the Congress is interested in as well as librarians and other information experts. Experts in finding any kind of information that the Members are interested in. I would like to emphasize in the statement the responsiveness of CRS. We are, as we say in the statement, just a phone call away from you, and, of course, right across the street from you. We provide the information to you in a great variety of formats, from telephone responses to exhaustive studies, with reports, and short papers, and databases, and briefings, and seminars of all kinds-a very flexible arrangement for you. And, of course, all of the service belongs only to the Members and the committees of Congress. We serve them when needed on a confidential basis, and we serve all of them. The statement describes the mission of the service basically set forth in a provision of the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1970 ing the support agencies at that time. It requires us to perform timely, non-partisan, objective, confidential assistance to the Congress. It takes the form of research analysis, consultation, information services on just about any subject that the Members are interested in. We are required to be available to all Members, committees, and staff to assist in legislative oversight and representational functions, and we work from the development of proposals to the preparation and conduct of hearings, to markup and writing of reports, to final floor consideration and beyond, to implementation and oversight of enactments. Last year we responded to nearly 650,000 individual requests from the Members of Congress and from the committees. We are overseen by the Joint Committee On The Library, as well as, of course, by the legislative committees that make up that committee in each House and as well, of course, by the legislative branch subcommittees of the two appropriation committees. Our chairman, Mr. Reid, of course, is here with us this morning. We think we have some unique characteristics-especially, of course, our role of serving the Members individually, we think are timeliness of response. I think we learned in looking at the recent figures that something over one-half of all of the responses we get from the Members are responded to the same day, which I think is a remarkable record. It is truly a fast-paced environment that we have in CRS; our range of expertise and integrated response capability we think is important, and a wide array of responses, the training programs that we provide, especially to the staffs of Members, the legislative staffs take the opportunity in great numbers to attend our programs; and, of course, our objectivity and balance, which we pride ourselves on. We would like to think that we serve as an institutional memory for the Members and for the committees. There is, as you know, a high turnover in congressional staff. That is not true in CRS. Our average longevity of our professionals in CRS is 15 years average. The statement mentions in some detail what we have been doing by way of assistance to the emerging democratic parliaments in Eastern and Central Europe. Mr. Dreier, of course, is a member of the Frost Task Force and is knowledgeable about those activities. We think we have been able to do that under the constraints imposed on us by the Joint Committee on the Library of not affecting significantly our work for the Members and the committees. think we have been successful at that. The statement also goes into some detail about avoiding duplication, and, of course, I know the other directors will be talking about that as well. We have established a rather intricate system to avoid duplication of effort. We talk to each other, we have a computerized database which we all participate in to make sure that everyone knows what everyone else is working on, and doesn't start a project that duplicates somebody else's. We have regular meetings of liaison groups from the four support agencies to see to it that we don't have duplication. And, of course, the statement mentions our relationships with does for the Congress as well as for others work on foreign law, which we do not do in CRS; the work of the Copyright Office, the work of the computer database installation at the library, and other parts of the library. The statement summarizes our organization, the changes we've made over the years, the efficiencies that we would like to think we've been very successful at bringing to the service. We have had a fairly steady staff in size over the last 10 or 12 years. The workload, however, has increased by about 6 percent a year, each during, during that period. I have been in the service for over 20 years, and every year that I've been there the workload has gone up-not only in the number of those informational requests that we get, but the substantive analytical requests that we get as well. We've established a planning process that has been in effect now for something over three years, has proved to help us to focus on how we can deal with the likely prospect of continuing increased workload with fewer resources. We know that is going to happen. It started happening last year. We imposed a hiring freeze a year ago-it's still in effect and, of course, with the bill that was reported out by the Appropriations Committee the other day, that's going to continue and we know that. We're preparing for that eventuality. The statement discusses some of our staff development activities. We are aware of the need for greater diversity among our staff. We have a program-a couple of programs-to deal with that. In the first three years of the program, it was quite successful. We doubled the numbers of minorities, for example, in our professional staff during that time. The suspension of hiring a year ago, of course, interfered with that. We hope that we will be able to resume the program soon. The statement also discusses the information technology aspects of our work. We have been quite successful. The Appropriations Committees have supported us over the years with bringing new technologies to bear on the information needs, and it has made a tremendous difference. I remember that when the last reorganization bill was winding its way through, they asked how much would it take to get to the point where you can perform this mission that we're laying out for you in the Reorganization Act of 1970. And we estimated 1,200 staff. Well, we completed the process of building up during the 1970s, and by 1980 we had reach 800 staff, and we were there. We're still about that number now. We're doing even more than we anticipated that we would be able to do. The statement concludes with our expressed wish to continue to look for opportunities, to maximum efficiencies, and face head on the need to explore ways to literally do more with less. We have established a resource priorities management team to explore and develop options for ensuring the quality of CRS Service within an environment of declining resources. If Congress is to meet the challenges and demands before it, I believe it must continue to have access to its own independent objec |