Another individual has an alternative proposal, and this happened with respect to the higher education alternatives, and we are incapable of estimating the impact of that individual's alternative, which means that that alternative is never considered by the subcommittee or the committee because it's ruled out of order because they don't have a cost-estimate associated with it.

So this puts us in a difficult position.

Mr. HERDMAN. Let me make four responses:

One, you're paying us to manage and we will manage. If that's going to be a cut, we will manage that.

Number two, I think that as the people who have gone before have said, that as the budget goes down, there will be-I think inevitably even under the best management-some diminution in services. It's probably true as well for CRS, and CBO, and, I suppose, for the ones to my right.

We didn't mention this-number three-we didn't mention this and I didn't mention this in my testimony, Mr. Vice Chairman, but we certainly are aware that this is undoubtedly a continuing process, and that there will be downsizing.

And so the fourth thing I would say is that we are doing that. I will just give you some examples of what we're doing:

We essentially have eliminated the operating division at OTA as an entity and divided up the office and so we've eliminated the whole management of that. They're now reporting to or will be reporting to assistant directors.

We are going to change the number of divisions, and, therefore, the number of senior people we have by downsizing from three to two. And we're probably going to in the process change the number of programs.

We're going to do this, however, with the advice and counsel of our board so that Congress is aware of the implications and provides input and advice to the process as it goes on. But I hope to do this in a way, as Joe Ross has said, that's incremental and is gradual. I think that he made a good point about we're probably in the area where we can try to do that without making draconian and rapid changes which hurt people and cause lay offs.

I hope to do it in a way where we set up institutional framework or organization where it becomes easier to eliminate. Our policy is, and I've told the staff this, to preserve our project teams, to preserve our service to the very end. So we're going to be slimming management as we have begun and we will continue, but at some point, of course, we will be slimming project teams as well. Mr. DREIER. Mr. DiMario.

Mr. DIMARIO. We're doing some of the same things, as Mr. Bowsher indicated earlier. We have a request in as part of our appropriations and the appropriations committees are treating it as a request from the legislative branch support agencies for authority to offer monies as an early out incentive to attempt to reduce the roles of GPO where we can in fact afford some reductions.

Within government service, employees generally cannot be forced out unless they're ready to go unless you use a RIF system, where you may lose people that you do not desire to lose, rather

And we can't afford to hurt ourselves operationally, so we're hopeful that that provision will pass.

Additionally, I have mandated to my office that we will have a general reduction in supervisory ranks of 25 percent as a target over the next three years. And, hopefully, with this budget authority from the appropriations committees, we will use that as a tool to reduce those ranks.

My freeze is primarily in the administrative areas, and I am not allowing any new hires so that we lose employment, particular individuals on the administrative side. We're generally not going to fill those positions until we can trim down on the administrative side.

We're also working very diligently with the Congress itself to set up new procedures by way of either changing product sizes or to capture key strokes at the source so that we do not have to re-key materials in the Government Printing Office, which is now the

case.

Part of that depends on the adoption of what we call SGML or Standard Generalized Markup Language, which is being adopted and will require an extensive training period of our own people and people on the Hill.

But, eventually, we will end up losing that part of our office that acts to rekey materials that come in, and that will be a dramatic reduction in cost to the Congress. It will take a considerable period of time for that to be accomplished, however.

Mr. BOWSHER. Well, I am somewhat like Bob Reischauer. I am always issuing reports on how to cut and how to see how big the budget deficit is, and it's something that we're fully aware of. And I think we've all have to do our share. In other words, I think we've got to come down. We've got to really turn our productivity gains into somewhat smaller staff.

My big worry as the chief auditor is the risk of not having done an audit or done a review and something blows up. In other words, like it happened to GSA in the last 1970s, the HUD situation. We had reviewed the HUD situation, we told everybody how bad the accounting systems were and everything like that.

That's one other area that if I maybe could give you another paper, Mr. Chairman, and that is that if we could ever get the executive branch to have good accounting financial management data systems that you could review and get better data out of much more efficiently, you could do this work a lot more efficiently than what we do today.

We have only been able to do audits of the three big military services in the last four or five years here, and we found just atrocious accounting and financial reporting, every bit as bad as New York City and the District of Columbia and HUD was just as bad.

So as long as you have those situations, you have risks. In other words, risk that money is going to be lost, taxpayer money is going to go out for fraud, waste, and abuse. And that's the kind of stuff that we worry about.

But I think again it's what we talked about earlier-we've got to just keep prioritizing the work requests and do the ones that are

year's budget. We will have to come down another 200, I'm sure, this year.

And I think the answer to your question of what period, I would say five years. If you do it all at once, it will take you years to rebuild.

A good example of this was, you know, they cut the supervisory staff and the bank examiners in half here in the early 1980s from 2,500 to 1,400 I think, and we had all those problems.

Now, they're up over 3,000. In other words, we don't want to go through that kind of an exercise. I think what we want to do is come down in an organized fashion over, I would say, a five-year period, starting from last year, and then see if each of us can't do it so that we can still be a very effective and efficient organization serving the Congress.

Mr. DREIER. Mr. Ross, talking about in response to Chairman Hamilton's question, the responsiveness that CRS has to the requests of Members of Congress, and this may be a rather delicate challenge for you; but, frankly, again I'm referring to the responsibility, which this committee has.

If there are recommendations that you all could provide as to how we could better work with your organizations, how you could be more responsive, how we could be fulfilling the needs, as Mr. Hamilton said, of our office but at the same time, decrease the demands that we have made on you, the overlap. And maybe there could be some provision whereby Members would have to in a direct way make requests of you, or requests could come from specific staff members rather than just any staff member in an office, maybe someone who has just been there for a short period of time. Those are the kinds of things that might allow us to bring about reductions in the level of expenditures in your areas, and, at the same time, maintain the responsiveness for which you are all wellknown. And so if you could provide that to this committee, I think it would be very helpful.

Mr. Hamilton.

Chairman HAMILTON. Well, if I may just add to that request, you are all very knowledgeable about the U.S. Congress, and you've observed this institution for a long time-most of you. You all have your specific areas of expertise, but I just want to invite you to contact us in anyway that is appropriate for you about your suggestions, about the U.S. Congress, whether or not they affect your specific area.

We would be interested in your ideas, and you can slip that to me in a back alley if you want to anonymously, however you want to get it to me, or you could write it to Dave and me directly.

We appreciate your testimony.

Mr. Dreier, we have a vote pending.

Thank you very much, gentlemen, for your testimony.

[Whereupon, at 11:35 p.m., the committee adjourned, to recon

APPENDIX

CRS

Congressional Research Service The Library of Congress. Washington, D.C. 20540-7000

STATEMENT OF JOSEPH E. ROSS, DIRECTOR
before the

JOINT COMMITTEE ON THE ORGANIZATION OF CONGRESS

June 10, 1993

Chairmen, Vice Chairmen, and Members of the Joint Committee:

The Resolution establishing this Committee provided that as part of its full and complete examination of the organization and operation of the Congress, the Committee's study should "include an examination of... the resources and working tools available to the legislative branch as compared to those available to the executive branch." Subsequently the Committee announced that "staff resources and the support agencies" would be one of eight issue areas constituting the core of its agenda. I am pleased to have the opportunity to speak to you today about the Congressional Research Service and the services it provides to Congress.

CRS, like its three sister agencies, is one of the "working tools" alluded to in the Resolution. Its sole function is to support the Congress. The House Report accompanying the enactment of our current organic statute in 1970 concluded that "[i]n the long run, we believe, it will be both less expensive and more productive to build up these supplementary research staffs than to disperse additional special staff among the committees." CRS was established and has evolved in a manner which I believe puts it in a unique position to assist the Congress in a time of increased fiscal restraint.

The Congressional Research Service was created to support Members in all of their legislative and representational roles and has made every effort to adapt to your changing needs. Whether as legislator, as committee or subcommittee member, or as representative of your constituency -- your needs define our job. Although the Service frequently performs its mission with a degree of anonymity, our staff members nevertheless see themselves as full

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