[Senate Hearing 118-181]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]


                                                          S. Hrg. 118-181

                       OVERSIGHT OF THE UNITED STATES 
                        GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE

=======================================================================

                                HEARING

                               BEFORE THE

                 COMMITTEE ON RULES AND ADMINISTRATION
                          UNITED STATES SENATE

                    ONE HUNDRED EIGHTEENTH CONGRESS

                             FIRST SESSION

                               __________

                       TUESDAY, DECEMBER 12, 2023

                               __________

    Printed for the use of the Committee on Rules and Administration
    
[GRAPHIC NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]    
    
    
                  Available on http://www.govinfo.gov

                                 ________

                   U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE                    
54-370                      WASHINGTON : 2024                    
          
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                COMMITTEE ON RULES AND ADMINISTRATION

                             FIRST SESSION

                  AMY KLOBUCHAR, Minnesota, Chairwoman

CHARLES E. SCHUMER, New York         DEB FISCHER, Nebraska
MARK R. WARNER, Virginia             MITCH McCONNELL, Kentucky
JEFF MERKLEY, Oregon                 TED CRUZ, Texas
ALEX PADILLA, California             SHELLEY MOORE CAPITO, West 
JON OSSOFF, Georgia                      Virginia
MICHAEL F. BENNET, Colorado          ROGER WICKER, Mississippi
PETER WELCH, Vermont                 CINDY HYDE-SMITH, Mississippi
LAPHONZA R. BUTLER, California       BILL HAGERTY, Tennessee
                                     KATIE BOYD BRITT, Alabama

                    Elizabeth Farrar, Staff Director
                Jackie Barber, Republican Staff Director


                         C  O  N  T  E  N  T  S

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                                                                  Pages

                         Opening Statement of:

Hon. Amy Klobuchar, Chairwoman, a United States Senator from the 
  State of Minnesota.............................................     1
Hon. Deb Fischer, a United States Senator from the State of 
  Nebraska.......................................................     2
Hon. Hugh Nathanial Halpern, Director, United States Government 
  Publishing Office, Washington, DC..............................     4

                         Prepared Statement of:

Hon. Hugh Nathanial Halpern, Director, United States Government 
  Publishing Office, Washington, DC..............................    16

                  Questions Submitted for the Record:

Hon. Amy Klobuchar, Chairwoman, a United States Senator from the 
  State of Minnesota to Hon. Hugh Nathanial Halpern, Director, 
  United States Government Publishing Office, Washington, DC.....    28


 
      OVERSIGHT OF THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE

                              ----------                              


                       TUESDAY, DECEMBER 12, 2023

                               United States Senate
                      Committee on Rules and Administration
                                                    Washington, DC.
    The Committee met, pursuant to notice, at 3:01 p.m., in 
Room 301, Russell Senate Office Building, Hon. Amy Klobuchar, 
Chairwoman of the Committee, presiding.
    Present: Senators Klobuchar, Fischer, Ossoff, Bennet, and 
Capito.

         OPENING STATEMENT OF HONORABLE AMY KLOBUCHAR,

            CHAIRWOMAN, A UNITED STATES SENATOR FROM

                     THE STATE OF MINNESOTA

    Chairwoman Klobuchar. Good afternoon. I call this hearing 
of the Rules and Administration Committee to order. I would 
like to thank Ranking Member Fischer and her staff, as well as 
Hugh Halpern, who is, of course, the Director of the Government 
Publishing Office, previously known as the Government Printing 
Office, before we changed it to get with the modern times.
    We are here today to discuss the critical role that GPO 
plays in making information from all three branches of 
government available to the public, delivering on its mission 
to publish trusted information for the Federal Government to 
the American people.
    GPO serves millions of Americans every year, with over 22 
million passports printed in the last fiscal year and more than 
10 billion downloads of government information since its 
website went online 30 years ago. I bet it is a lot more 
available than it was when everything was just printed.
    Established in 1860, GPO was created by Congress to print 
government documents and to bring transparency and 
accountability to our democracy.
    GPO began work on the same day that President Lincoln was 
inaugurated. Were you there? No. Okay.
    [Laughter.]
    Chairwoman Klobuchar. One of the first major documents that 
it was responsible for printing was the Emancipation 
Proclamation. In the decades since then, GPO has printed, 
published, and preserved so much of our country's history, and 
it has adapted its work to keep up with increasing demands and 
new technology along the way.
    As GPO's work has expanded to digital publishing, its name, 
as I noted, was changed in 2014, when former Senator Saxby
Chambliss and I worked together to pass bipartisan legislation 
that was signed into law by President Obama.
    Under Director Halpern's leadership, GPO has continued to 
modernize and expand the resources it offers to the public. 
Later this month, it will publish an online library of reports 
that Federal agencies submit to Congress.
    This new resource is the result of the bipartisan Access to 
Congressionally Mandated Reports Act that I led with former 
Republican Senator Rob Portman, joined by Peters, Hassan, 
Rosen, and Warnock. It became law last year.
    Last year, GPO also issued a 5-year strategic plan, 
highlighting goals to invest in new technology and additional 
in-house services that will lower production costs and save 
taxpayers money.
    At the same time, GPO is focused on historic preservation 
that will make even more information accessible, including 
through its work to digitize historical and government 
documents with more than 1,100 libraries nationwide.
    Finally, GPO is working to address challenges and harness 
potential efficiencies offered by artificial intelligence. I 
also look forward to hearing about Director Halpern's efforts 
to ensure that GPO's work force is strong.
    It is especially important as about half of GPO's dedicated 
employees are eligible for retirement in the next four years. 
This will include recruiting the next generation of workers, 
and GPO has expanded both its recent graduate development 
program and its apprenticeship program, which provide young 
workers with a pathway into these careers, which accounted for 
nearly 20 percent of GPO's new hires last year.
    I would like to acknowledge the members of the recent 
graduates program who are here today, I know seated behind you, 
Director. I will also note that these new employees are joining 
an agency that continues to receive recognition as a good place 
to work.
    For the second year in a row, Forbes named GPO as one of 
the best employers for veterans, with veterans making up over a 
third of its work force.
    I look forward to hearing more about what GPO is doing to 
carry out its mission. Thank you again, Mr. Halpern. I now 
recognize Ranking Member Fischer for her opening statement.

  OPENING STATEMENT OF HONORABLE DEB FISCHER, A UNITED STATES 
               SENATOR FROM THE STATE OF NEBRASKA

    Senator Fischer. Good afternoon. I would like to thank 
Chairwoman Klobuchar for holding this hearing and welcome you, 
Director Halpern, back to the Committee for the first time 
since your confirmation in 2019.
    Continued oversight of agencies within our jurisdiction is 
one of our most important duties, and I am glad to have the 
chance to learn more about where GPO stands four years into 
Director Halpern's leadership. Since its inception in 1860, the 
Government Publishing Office has served as the official 
resource for the production, distribution, and preservation of 
documents for all three branches of the Federal Government.

    GPO's work is not always flashy, but the agency serves as 
the gold standard for government documentation and 
dissemination. I thank you, Director, and your team for your 
hard work.
    Although the nature of publishing and the way people gather 
information has changed, the critical importance of GPO's work 
has not. In an increasingly digital era, GPO has the 
responsibility to meet the needs of a modern public without 
sacrificing the core mission.
    GPO recently celebrated the impressive feat of reaching 9 
billion retrievals of government information from their online 
repository, GovInfo, demonstrating the continued market for 
their services.
    Since Director Halpern's confirmation, GPO has seen many 
advances, ranging from investments in modern printing equipment 
to the successful launch of their congressionally mandated 
reports portal. This portal will allow Federal agencies to 
submit their reports online for the public to access.
    Transparency in government is of the utmost importance, and 
I appreciate the progress Director Halpern and GPO have made in 
making Federal documents more easily available to our 
constituents.
    However, GPO still has its challenges, including how to 
maintain a work force with such a high number of eligible 
retirees, how to strategically invest in relevant emerging 
machinery and printing technologies, and how to think 
creatively about the publication needs of Congress and the 
public.
    As GPO plans for the future, the agency must continue to 
fulfill its duty to the American people. It is important that 
the agency balance its necessary expenses with long term fiscal 
stability and examine how the decisions of today will impact 
the agency of tomorrow.
    Dr. Halpern, I am encouraged by the steady improvements GPO 
has made under your leadership, and I look forward to hearing 
your answers to questions about how we can continue to build on 
this momentum. Thank you, Madam Chairwoman.
    Chairwoman Klobuchar. Very good. Thank you, Senator 
Fischer. Our witness, as we have noted today, is Director of 
the Government Publishing Office, Hugh Halpern, who has been in 
his current position since his unanimous confirmation, that 
sounds nice, by the Senate in December 2019.
    He is now four years into his ten-year term, which is a 
result of legislation led by former Senator Blunt and myself. 
The position used to serve at the pleasure of the President, 
and that has now been changed. Previously, Mr. Halpern worked 
here on Capitol Hill for 30 years, most recently as Director of 
floor Operations for former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan.
    You might not want to be Director of floor Operations right 
now, so I am glad that you are in your job. He received his 
bachelor's and master's degrees from American University and 
his law degree from George Mason.
    Now, if you could please stand and raise your right hand. 
Okay. Do you swear that the testimony you will give before the 
Committee shall be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but 
the truth, so help you God?
    Mr. Halpern. I do.

    Chairwoman Klobuchar. Thank you. You will be seated. We 
will now proceed to your testimony, and then we will--Senator 
Fischer can ask the first round of questions. Go ahead.

         OPENING STATEMENT OF HONORABLE HUGH NATHANIAL

          HALPERN, DIRECTOR, UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT

                PUBLISHING OFFICE, WASHINGTON DC

    Mr. Halpern. Thank you so much, Chairwoman Klobuchar, 
Ranking Member Fischer. It is a pleasure to be here, and to be 
accompanied by my teammates in our recent graduate program. 
They are a really impressive group of folks.
    On behalf of GPO's more than 1,600 craftspeople and 
professionals, I am pleased to be able to tell the Committee 
that GPO is in good shape and the agency is poised for 
continued success.
    In terms of GPO's finances, we are on track for another 
solid year of performance. While I am still awaiting final 
figures from our auditors, I believe that our final 
consolidated revenue for last year will be more than the prior 
year's total of $1.1 billion. We have been aggressively hiring 
to support the growth in passports and secure documents to 
ensure that our team is prepared for what lies ahead.
    During fiscal year 2023, we onboarded 190 new teammates, 41 
percent more than we did in fiscal year 2022. Strong 
recruitment is critical as we hire to support new work and to 
offset significant looming retirements among our team. We have 
been able to recruit because of our dedication to making GPO a 
great place to work and our willingness to experiment with 
alternate work arrangements.
    For instance, in our passport division, we successfully 
implemented a 4-day workweek where our teammates work ten hours 
a day. This cuts down on wear and tear of our equipment while 
giving our teammates the flexibility of a 3-day weekend or 
overtime work when it is available.
    Similarly, we are in the final stages of standing up a 
weekend shift at our Mississippi production facility to test 
the efficacy of a 3-day workweek for our teammates who are 
willing to work for more hours, fewer days per week.
    These innovations, along with our efforts to build a kind 
and effective culture, are why Forbes has recognized GPO as a 
great place to work two years in a row. We continue our 
dedication to support the work of Congress and our other 
Federal Government customers.
    Last year, Congress directed GPO to develop a system to 
make reports requested by Congress available to the public and 
policymakers alike. I am very pleased to announce that 
congressionally mandated reports are available online starting 
today on our trusted digital repository, govinfo.gov. As of 
today----
    Chairwoman Klobuchar. You are making us feel very powerful. 
Thank you.
    [Laughter.]
    Mr. Halpern. I am glad I can help. As of today, there are 
more than 125 reports available, and more than 50 agencies 
registered on the system. I expect these figures to grow as 
agencies understand their obligations under the law.

    GPO met this deadline about two weeks sooner than what was 
required by the statute. That is what we do at GPO. We deliver 
for our customers and meet difficult deadlines.
    We have also started to work on a project of personal 
interest to me as a longtime committee staffer. The format of 
Congress's committee reports has not substantially changed 
since GPO started its work in 1861. They are difficult to read, 
they are hard to manage digitally, and do not easily support 
basic features that our customers want, such as graphics or 
color. While our new composition engine XPub, is in testing for 
bills, resolutions, and amendments, we have started talking to 
focus groups about what a committee report for the 21st century 
looks like.
    I have dubbed this effort ``Project Common Press'', named 
after Ben Franklin's printing press design. We have been 
discussing report design options with staff from the Joint 
Committee on Printing, and House and Senate institutional 
officers.
    In the new calendar year, we will start talking to our 
committee customers, as well as our partners in the library and 
civic communities. Before the end of 2024, we hope to have a 
report style guide and digital formatting standard that we can 
release for public comment and use as we start to work on a new 
authoring solution for committee reports.
    Last, I need to touch on the transition in the Federal 
Depository Library Program. As you know, the FDLP is moving to 
a digital program based on the recommendations of our library 
task force.
    However, given the prospect of flat funding for the FDLP 
for the foreseeable future, we need to accelerate that 
transition by reducing the quantity and variety of tangible 
materials sent to libraries.
    We are currently working with our FDLP partners to allocate 
the remaining copies of popular publications, like the Code of 
Federal Regulations, so that they are accessible to the 
greatest number of patrons across the country.
    We are also working to improve the availability of 
documents on govinfo.gov and assist some of our partner 
libraries to digitize unique Federal documents so they can also 
be available nationwide.
    The goal is to provide the best possible access to Federal 
documents for our partner libraries and their patrons, and we 
are working very hard to make that a reality. Madam Chairwoman 
and Ranking Member Fischer, thank you for the opportunity to 
testify before the Committee today, and I look forward to any 
questions you may have.
    [The prepared statement of Mr. Halpern was submitted for 
the record.]
    Chairwoman Klobuchar. Very good. Thank you. I will let 
Senator Fischer go first.
    Senator Fischer. Thank you, Madam Chairwoman. Director 
Halpern, GPO has been consistently ranked as one of the best 
employers in the Nation with high levels of employee 
satisfaction, regarding your performance as director, and with 
day to day morale.
    How are you leveraging GPO's reputation as a great place to 
work into meeting the work force challenges that you have 
identified, and especially that being the aging work force, 
which you have said is a top concern that you have?

    Mr. Halpern. Absolutely. One of the things that I 
identified very early, even before I came to GPO, was the need 
to highlight the fact that there are areas of Federal 
Government employment that are as much trades as they are 
professions.
    As I think post-COVID, there is a realization that a 4-year 
college degree is not necessarily for everybody. There are 
great places where we can develop some of the talent for folks 
that may not necessarily go to college, but they can bring a 
lot of their skills and expertise to those jobs. That is one of 
the things we are focused on at GPO.
    We have mentioned the recent grads program for folks who 
did go to college. We also have been ramping up our apprentice 
program. We started one class just with proofreaders. We have 
expanded that this year to a number of different trades, 
including press people and prepress folks, and I look to expand 
that more as we go forward.
    Senator Fischer. Where do you advertise to find people to 
fill those positions? Do you work, or do you try to steal them 
from other businesses? Do you work with community colleges? 
Where do you find them?
    Mr. Halpern. The short answer is ``e'', all of the above. 
To be honest, the other businesses that we normally pulled 
from--so newspapers, publishing houses, other printers--they 
are diminishing. There are fewer and fewer of those kinds of 
businesses.
    I spend a fair amount of my time traveling to vocational 
high schools or community colleges to sort of pitch GPO as a 
career. If you are a graphic designer or you participate in one 
of the print programs and at a technical high school in 
Maryland, we want you to know that GPO that can provide you 
with a great career going forward.
    We want to bring in as many young people as we can so this 
knowledge transfer occurs between the folks who have been doing 
this for a while and the folks who still have some opportunity 
to learn. That is really where my focus is.
    Senator Fischer. With all of the newer printing 
technologies that are out there, I guess I am thinking you 
would have to go to an educational institution to be able to 
access some of that to get younger members, wouldn't you, of 
your--?
    Mr. Halpern. The good news is, as we adopt newer 
technologies, some of the learning curve, some of that 
threshold knowledge that you need actually disappears because 
the machines do a lot of that work for you.
    Now, we are still going to need really talented press 
people. There is always going to be a need for traditional 
offset printing, which really requires a dedicated skill set. 
But for instance, we adopted digital inkjet technology to run 
our daily publications--the Congressional Record, Federal 
Register, committee reports, things like that. Those operate 
much more akin to really, really large office copiers.
    Senator Fischer. I know that you have seen some delays in 
printing bills, not just for Members, but also for the bills 
that are reported out of committee. How do you--how are you 
trying to recognize that and improve the efficiency and 
processing in printing ongressional bills so we do not add to 

delays that we may have here in the Senate's legislative process?
    Mr. Halpern. I need to be a little delicate here, but this 
is largely not--while the problem manifests itself equally in 
both bodies, it is not a problem necessarily created by the 
Senate.
    We have seen a huge increase in the volume of bills sent to 
GPO, and that has largely been a result of the number of bills 
introduced in the House. Our problem is that we have a small 
but hugely talented group of proofreaders, of prepress folks, 
who review those measures and make sure that they are ready for 
publication. These teammates are really akin to specialized 
paralegals.
    It is very hard for us to train those folks and get new 
folks into that area, although we are working on that. We have 
been talking with the House about options to figure out how we 
can manage that flow and make sure that we are accommodating 
both bodies and the critical priorities of the House and the 
Senate.
    Sometimes we are not 100 percent successful, and we are 
going to work on that and make sure that we deliver the 
standards that everybody expects.
    Senator Fischer. Thank you. Thank you, Madam Chair.
    Chairwoman Klobuchar. Thank you very much, Senator Fischer. 
You talked about some of the employees and what you need now. I 
was noting that you have adapted your work force over the 
years.
    For instance, this is kind of amazing, with the shift to 
digital publishing, you reduced from 6,000 employees in 1980 to 
1,600 currently.
    Can you talk about the areas where you see change now, 
where you may add some people, given your success with $1 
billion in revenue and the increasing demands on the digital 
system?
    Mr. Halpern. Well, absolutely. We are doing--there have 
been a number of areas where we are hiring. The biggest area 
where we have been hiring is in our high tech manufacturing 
process for the U.S. passport and for secure identity 
documents.
    While the passport is our biggest single product, we do 
other secure documents as well. For instance, if you have 
Global Entry, you have a card that goes along with that. We 
manufacture those cards for our DHS customer. That is just one 
example. We do law enforcement credentials. We do a whole host 
of those things.
    We have been hiring a lot of folks to support that 
operation to the point where we actually created a whole new 
role, production technician. We worked with our unions to 
create this position where we could take folks who had some 
aptitude for working in a manufacturing environment and provide 
a 3-year on the job training program for them.
    We are also hiring on the digital side as well. Both for 
development of GovInfo, our trusted digital repository, but 
also for the software stack that we maintain for Congress and 
for some of our other customers as well. We are hiring IT 
specialists and developers and programmers to support the 
software transition that we are going through right now.
    The--if you go to Senate Legislative Counsel and have them 
draft a bill, when they hit control-P to print that document 
for you,

GPO's software takes over. The piece of software that they use 
today first went into service when I was 12.
    It has been a long time since I have been 12. We are 
replacing that with our new composition engine called XPub that 
will provide a whole host of additional capabilities both for 
our users and for the public. It will provide information in 
new ways.
    We need folks to support that. Some of the folks in the 
recent grad program are supporting that as well. We are hiring 
a host of folks in those areas. We will need folks who have 
some skills in AI and other things as we look to leverage some 
of the newer technologies to automate our processes, to make up 
for the fact that we are going to be losing folks over the next 
couple of years.
    Chairwoman Klobuchar. Yes. You talked about--we have talked 
about these congressionally mandated reports, and you talked 
about over 100 that are already out. What steps will you take 
to make the public aware of this resource once it becomes 
available online?
    Mr. Halpern. We do a lot of outreach with--both as an 
agency across our social media channels and other channels like 
that. But actually, one of our greatest advocates is the 
library community.
    We are working very closely with them to make sure that 
they are talking to their patrons, whether they are in your 
average public library, if they are at a university or a law 
school, so that they are letting their patrons know that these 
documents are out there.
    As I talk with folks both in the library community, the 
sort of civil society groups, we do a lot of outreach to make 
sure that folks know about the resources that GPO brings to 
bear in making government information available to the public.
    Chairwoman Klobuchar. Very good. You mentioned artificial 
intelligence. We know that it is developing quickly.
    We have had a series of bipartisan meetings here to set up 
a framework for the United States, putting forward our own 
rules of the road, and we--including some that are under the 
jurisdiction of this Committee, involving democracy.
    Of course, this is going to affect GPO. In October, GPO 
released a directive to establish policies of the use of AI at 
the agency. Can you talk briefly on efforts to address the risk 
and the opportunities, especially in your area, that come with 
the use of AI?
    Mr. Halpern. Absolutely. Our directive sets up a framework 
and sets up a way of approaching the opportunities presented by 
artificial intelligence or large language models.
    To date, we still have not found technology that is 
sufficient to replace some of our really talented teammates in 
the work that they do. You know, one obvious area is 
proofreading. At its most basic level, that is pattern 
matching, something that AI should excel at. But again, today's 
technologies are not ready to even supplement one of our 
talented proofreaders.
    The way we are approaching these problems is asking how do 
we build the foundations so that when these technologies may be 
ready, so whether that is in three years, five years, eight 
years, we can be in a position to take advantage of them so 
that we can free up our really talented human beings out of 
doing the scut work to make sure that there are the right 
number of digits in a dollar figure, and they are instead 
making sure that the overall look and

feel of the document matches the style and do the kinds of 
things that human beings can do.
    Chairwoman Klobuchar. Very good. You talked a bit about 
contracts. GPO manages a large amount of contracts with over 80 
percent of its printing performed by private sector vendors who 
are awarded contracts on a competitive basis.
    In its top management challenges report issued earlier this 
year, the GPO Inspector General recommended the need for a 
systemic approach as the agency continues to prevent contract 
fraud.
    What steps are you taking to ensure the contracting process 
is managed efficiently?
    Mr. Halpern. We are working very closely with our IG to 
make sure that our process is free from fraud. When our 
teammates find things that they suspect might be issues, we 
actively encourage them to refer them over to the IG for 
further investigation.
    We run basically two different sets of contracts. One is a 
set of contracts that we use to buy the materials that we need 
for our own production needs, and the other is the contracting 
we do on behalf of other customers, whether it is Congress, the 
Judiciary, or the Executive branch. Really, the key there is 
two things.
    It is education, making sure that the folks doing the 
contracting know what to look for. The other thing is 
experience, because the more of these you do, the more you look 
at, the more you know where there are problems.
    Again, that is the kind of thing where relying on well-
trained human beings is really kind of critical. We think we 
are making good progress on that front. I talk with our IG at 
least weekly, and we are looking forward to continuing our 
record on that front.
    Chairwoman Klobuchar. Okay. I know Senator Capito is on her 
way, so I am not filibustering, but sort of. Okay, well, as she 
sits down, one last question.
    GPO's headquarters in Washington, DC. has been in the same 
location since it opened its doors, and like any historic 
buildings, requires regular maintenance and repairs.
    Can you speak briefly on the efforts GPO is taking to 
ensure its facilities remain a safe place to work, including 
your plans to implement the IG's safety recommendations?
    Mr. Halpern. Absolutely. The IG identified a number--in 
their recent report on our top ten safety issues, they had a 
number of recommendations, all of which we are in the process 
of implementing.
    One, we have issued a new directive on, and the other two, 
we are working through. GPO's building is old. Our headquarters 
that we are occupying now is actually a cluster of three 
buildings--all built between 1903 and 1940, and they are 
showing their age. The good news is they have got good bones.
    We have a facilities team that is looking at the needs of 
the building, prioritizing both what we need to do for 
expansion and what we need to do for safety. For instance, we 
are well down the road of replacing the fire safety systems in 
the building.
    You know, one area that we are going to need to look at in 
the coming years are replacing our elevators, which is an 
expensive proposition. But all of these things are being 
factored into a larger

facilities management plan, and our plan is to make sure that 
we are in a position to keep our workplace as safe as possible.
    Chairwoman Klobuchar. Okay. Very good. Senator Capito has 
joined us. Just for the new recruits out there, there are a 
number of people in their program, there are male Senators, 
they just are not here today. It is just us.
    [Laughter.]
    Chairwoman Klobuchar. Senator Capito.
    Senator Capito. Yes. Thanks, Madam Chair, thanks to the 
Ranking Member, and thanks to Mr. Halpern. For those of you who 
do not know, we are getting reunited on the Rules Committee 
because we were on the House Rules Committee.
    He was there as a great staffer as I was in my first two 
years on Rules Committee. It is very nice to see you again, as 
always. Let me ask you, I will kind of jump on to the--about 
the safety of the building.
    I noticed in your remarks that you discussed the telework 
policy. I am sure, and if this question has already been asked, 
I apologize, but I am interested in it. There was a GAO study 
that showed that 17 of the 24 Federal agency headquarters that 
were reviewed are utilizing an estimated average of 25 percent 
or less of their respective building's capacity.
    Obviously, it is very costly to the taxpayer to be paying 
for the full use of the buildings that are not actually being 
utilized. What is the percentage of your employees that are 
working remotely? I will ask that first.
    Mr. Halpern. Sure. About two-thirds of our teammates come 
to work every single day. They are manufacturing or production 
employees. It is about a third of the agency that works either 
remote or hybrid.
    Senator Capito. Then what are those policies for the remote 
workers? Is it a certain amount of days a week, hours? How does 
that--?
    Mr. Halpern. We are focused on getting results. It is--
unlike a lot of typical agencies, the GPO operates as a 
business, so it is really easy to see whether we are being 
successful or not. We do have a telework and remote work policy 
in place.
    For telework folks they need to come back into the office a 
couple of days a week. But for some of our remote folks, they 
are working fully remote and doing it successfully.
    Let me give you one example. Prior to the pandemic, we had 
about 12 regional offices, and they were put there because 
originally our customers needed to come to those offices to 
review things.
    Nobody had been doing that for years. When we shifted to a 
remote model during the pandemic, we figured out that actually 
worked for that group. That is about 100 folks. They are now 
fully remote and----
    Senator Capito. Are the 12--not to interrupt, but are the 
12 offices still open then?
    Mr. Halpern. No.
    Senator Capito. You closed that?
    Mr. Halpern. We closed them. Saved the taxpayer about $1 
million a year in rent and overhead. We are still having great 
success.

We estimate that unit for the last fiscal year will hit just 
shy of $500 million in total contracts, and that is a new 
record for them. We expect to see continued growth out of that 
group.
    It has also allowed us to recruit nationwide, which is 
something that we could not do previously. If we have a group 
that is servicing East Coast customers, I can have a member of 
that group who lives in Hawaii, as long as they are willing to 
work the hours needed to support those customers.
    For us, I cannot speak to other agencies, but for us, 
telework and remote work has helped us with recruiting, it has 
helped us with retention, and it has helped us with 
productivity.
    Senator Capito. Yes. I was going to ask you about that 
because I noted in your statement that you mentioned about a 
lot of your workers were reaching the age of retirement, soon 
to be. Since work has sort of changed since COVID in a lot of 
circumstances, certainly in the Federal Government, is it--and 
this is a generalized question.
    I think it would be interesting to know just across the 
board, because I think private sector, too. Is it a requirement 
now that you offer the flexibility to the newer worker coming 
in? Is this an expectation? Are you finding that?
    Mr. Halpern. It depends on the role. As I said, about two-
thirds of our folks come to work every day because you cannot 
take a printing press home.
    Senator Capito. Right.
    Mr. Halpern. I think in our manufacturing role----
    Senator Capito. Especially if you are printing money, you 
do not want to take the printing----
    Mr. Halpern. That is a different group, but----
    Senator Capito. I got you off there, sorry.
    Mr. Halpern. No, no, no. It is--so for our manufacturing 
employees, for our production employees, there is an 
expectation that you are going to work those hours.
    Senator Capito. Right, right.
    Mr. Halpern. I was discussing in my oral statement we are 
looking at different ways of approaching even that. For 
instance, for the folks who print passports, we have shifted to 
a four day a week, ten hour a day schedule. It works for us, 
works for them.
    Similarly, we are really close to standing up a weekend 
shift, in our Mississippi production facility to see if that 
can be successful for those of those teammates who may want to 
work a longer day, but fewer days a week.
    That is the same kind of flexibility that we can use in a 
production environment that we can also use in the more 
traditional knowledge worker roles. You know, we asked our 
first class of recent grads, and we have got some of those 
folks behind me, we said, does the availability of remote work, 
did that factor into your decision to choose GPO? Almost three-
quarters of them said that it did.
    Senator Capito. Last question, if I could. You mentioned 
passports. I am curious to know, are we going to--are we going 
to go to a digital passport? Is that in our future?
    Mr. Halpern. The----
    Senator Capito. The people behind you are smiling.

    Mr. Halpern. Because they are more closely involved with 
some of that planning than I am. But the short answer is that 
the current version of the passport that we just started 
producing in April for our State Department customer is 
probably going to be good for about 10 to 15 years. That was 
the length of the last one.
    We are in discussions, both the State Department and GPO 
supporting them, with all of the other international partners 
about what the next passport looks like. It is likely that that 
will continue to be tied to a physical document.
    There may be a digital component, but you will still need a 
physical document to key to that. I think we have got probably 
a good another 20 years or so of still having some sort of 
physical document.
    Senator Capito. Thank you.
    Mr. Halpern. I am good at telling the future, but not that 
good.
    Senator Capito. Thank you. Thanks for all the hard work you 
all do. Thank you.
    Mr. Halpern. Thank you.
    Chairwoman Klobuchar. Very good. Senator Fischer.
    Senator Fischer. Thank you, Madam Chairwoman. Mr. Halpern, 
you were talking about all the really cool things that are 
happening with technology and what your office is going to be 
able to do with that.
    But I know that you still have certain congressional 
publications like committee reports and hearing records that 
use the same format for the last hundred years, and they can be 
kind of hard to read, really small print.
    I understand even the pages are different formatting as 
well. I assume we are still going to be using printed 
materials. What are you going to do about getting us up to 
speed on formatting?
    Mr. Halpern. This is--you will excuse me while I get out my 
soapbox. I really appreciate the question. I always use the 
committee report as an example. I either wrote myself or was 
responsible for the production of probably about 3,000 of them 
over my House career.
    The printed format of that document is designed for the 
offset printing environment, and each page is the size that it 
is because we can fit 64 of those along an aluminum plate that 
fits on an offset printing drum. GPO, as I mentioned, has 
switched over largely to digital inkjet printing technology.
    That means it does not matter to us how many pages we can 
fit on a drum. We can make that page size whatever we want, 
from letter-sized to the same size it is now. We have a new 
kind of printing technology. We are updating that software 
stack that I talked about earlier.
    Congress seems to be willing to reexamine the ways it has 
traditionally done things. This presents us with an 
opportunity, and I think one that folks seem to be interested 
in taking advantage of.
    We have started doing the work of saying, if we were 
building a committee report from scratch, what would that look 
like? You know, I think folks are indicating to us that 
something that is centered around a letter sized piece of paper 
makes a lot of sense. Something that can support color, that 
uses larger typefaces, that uses more consistent header styles, 
all of those kinds of things.

    We are at the front-end of that project now, but I really 
hope before the end of the year we will have an idea of what 
that is going to look like, and then we can start building the 
tools to help folks easily author those documents.
    You know, what--it will be a little harder for us to get to 
bill text just because over the last 200--almost 250 years, we 
have developed some bad habits in how we author legislation.
    That is going to take us a little bit more work. But I 
think committee reports are a great place for us to start. 
Hearings are basically the same format. We can use those as a 
jumping off point for a lot of other legislative documents, to 
both make them better in print, and to make them more 
accessible digitally, so that it does not matter whether you 
are looking at it on paper, on a tablet, or on a computer.
    Senator Fischer. You know, as you are making the switch 
over to more and more technology and the benefits that we see 
with it, how do you see these investments in the newer 
technologies having a positive, hopefully a positive fiscal 
impact in the future? If it will be sustainable? Have you begun 
to see any cost savings improvements that are already taking 
place?
    Mr. Halpern. Absolutely. I can get you more definitive 
numbers on what that looks like. But let me give you an example 
of the shift from offset printing to digital inkjet.
    The way that traditional offset printing works, there is a 
long runway to get that machine set up and operating at peak 
efficiency. Let us take the Congressional Record as a good 
example: 15, 20 years ago, the circulation of that document was 
20,000, 25,000 copies a day.
    When we set that up on these big industrial web offset 
presses, having essentially 2,000 or 3,000 copies that we throw 
away every day because that is what it took to get the machine 
set up and running well, was an okay investment.
    That first copy always cost you tens of thousands of 
dollars, but each additional copy was just pennies. You dollar-
cost-averaged that over the entire print. But the problem is 
that that same Congressional Record that 15 years ago was 
25,000 copies a day, today is about--it is less than 1,500 
printed copies.
    Digital inkjet, we have got almost no waste. There is 
almost no environmental impact. The cost per page is both lower 
than that initial cost for the offset and more consistent over 
the entire print run.
    We can show you what that math looks like, but that is just 
one example of how that technology is helping.
    Senator Fischer. Madam Chairwoman, could I ask one more 
question? Thanks. You talked about being able to close some 
offices for various reasons. When you have this underutilized 
space, and as you continue to streamline, I guess, the GPO's 
presence, what kind of model are you looking at there? What are 
some of the measures that you are using in order to accomplish 
that?
    Mr. Halpern. As we have changed how we work, we have 
changed our space utilization as well. For instance, one thing 
that we are looking at closely is, can we bring in other 
partners into our facility?

   A really good example of this was supporting Congress and 
the Center for Legislative Archives through the Archives, the 
National Archives. Congress was looking for a good place to 
store its records. Because we had surplus space, we were able 
to provide a good place for that.
    I believe we have got about between 50,000 and 60,000 
square feet that we have dedicated to that purpose, both a 
phase one that is operational today and a phase two that we are 
looking to build out over the next few years.
    We are looking for partners to take up some of that space. 
But to be honest, at the moment, while we are talking with all 
of our business units about what their space needs look like, 
we do not have that much vacant space.
    We may undergo some consolidation so that as we have got 
more folks who are only coming to the DC headquarters a couple 
of days a week or whatever, we can rearrange space.
    Instead of having large cube farms, we can have more 
meeting space, more collaboration space so the folks can really 
use those facilities on the days they are in the office.
    I think the myth of us having, huge amounts of space just 
sitting fallow is not the reality. The other thing to keep in 
mind is often we need pretty substantial swing space as we 
change technologies.
    Passports are a really good example. Right now, we have, as 
of April, we have shifted over to what is now the current 
generation, the next generation passport. As we look to build 
out the manufacturing facility for the passport that we are 
going to have in another ten years, we need space to start 
building that facility now so that it is ready when we do the 
changeover.
    Senator Fischer. Thank you.
    Chairwoman Klobuchar. Well, very good. I want to thank 
Ranking Member Fischer and the Members of this Committee for a 
productive hearing.
    Thank you also, Mr. Halpern, for answering all of our 
questions, sharing what you have done, bringing many of your 
new recruits and team members with you. It was very exciting to 
hear about what you are doing to modernize our government, to 
bring more transparency.
    I look forward to continuing to work with my colleagues on 
this Committee to support the GPO and its dedicated employees.
    The hearing record will remain open for one week. I do want 
to tell all the people who maybe have not been at a Committee 
hearing, it is not always this pleasant, so you are really 
lucky. It is kind of a holiday special for all of you.
    As I said, the hearing record will remain open for a year, 
and we are adjourned. Thank you. For a week. Oh, my goodness. 
One week. Thank you.
    Mr. Halpern. Thank you.
    [Whereupon, at 3:52 p.m., the hearing was adjourned.]


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