President Bush’s budget director said in a May 3 memo to executive department heads that federal agencies should not have to obtain their printing services through the Government Printing Office. “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,” wrote Office of Management and Budget Director Mitch Daniels, who claimed the move would save from $50 million to $70 million annually, largely in fees GPO charges when it contracts work out to the private sector.
Although federal law calls for nearly all agency printing to go through GPO, Daniels said a 1996 opinion by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel maintained that Congress could not constitutionally force executive branch offices to use GPO. The memo called for a change in the Federal Acquisition Regulation rules to reflect his suggested policy.
GPO spokesperson Andrew Sherman said Daniels’s plan would actually result in greater costs, since agencies would be unable to negotiate GPO’s volume discounts. Moreover, he feared that the change would endanger the federal depository library program through which agencies distribute their publications to libraries. If agencies go outside GPO for their printing, it will be “difficult if not impossible” to ensure that all items designated for the Superintendent of Documents program reach depository libraries, Sherman told American Libraries.
“This process will not happen overnight,” noted Sherman, who said the next step would be OMB’s publication of a notice of proposed rulemaking in the Federal Register, at which point all stakeholders, including librarians, will have the opportunity to comment. Daniels’s memo, he said, “is sort of the opening trumpet as the games begin.”
Posted May 13, 2002.