[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 141 (Monday, October 3, 1994)]
[Senate]
[Page S]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                SENATE PILOT TEST OF ON-DEMAND PRINTING

  Mr. FORD. Mr. President, I am pleased to announce that the Senate 
will begin a pilot test of on-demand printing this fall and through the 
first session of the 104th Congress. This program has been put together 
with the full cooperation and assistance of the Secretary of the 
Senate, the Senate Sergeant at Arms, the Government Printing Office, 
the Joint Committee on Printing, and the Senate Rules Committee.
  Let me briefly explain the problem that hopefully we are going to 
fix. Title 44 of the United States Code, which deals with public 
printing, requires the Senate to print a specified number of bills and 
resolutions, usually several hundred copies. These numbers were 
established to ensure full public access to legislative proposals long 
before we had today's new communications, printing, and computing 
technologies. Consequently, we are printing large numbers of documents 
that we never use.
  To give you an idea of the magnitude of this problem; at the end of 
the two sessions of the last Congress the Senate Document Room staff 
disposed of over 40 million pages of documents that were not used. Mr. 
President, I say to friends, that required almost 225 cords of wood--or 
3,370 trees--covering 9\1/2\ acres. That is enough wood to build 11 
single family homes.
  Hopefully, here is how the program will work. The Government Printing 
Office will place a copy machine in the Senate Document Room which will 
be linked by a fiber optic communication line to the central GPO 
building. When additional copies of a bill, resolution, or other 
official documents are requested, the text of that document will be 
communicated electronically from the GPO building to this copy machine 
and the exact number of needed copies will be produced on the spot. 
This will eliminate the need to stock large quantities which end up in 
a recycle bin.
  Under section 707 of title 44, the Joint Committee on Printing can 
limit the number of copies printed in the interest of economy and 
efficiency. Therefore, I have asked the Secretary of the Senate to 
examine the required print volumes and provide lower limits to meet 
known requirements, and to use the on-demand printing facility to 
supply additional copies when requested.
  Next year when we examine the results of the pilot, I am confident 
that we will have produced a win-win situation. That is, we will give 
users the documents they need when they need them--we will have had a 
favorable impact on the environment--and we will have saved the 
taxpayers a large quantity of money.
  Mr. President, I look forward to putting this into effect. I thank 
the Chair and yield the floor.
  Mrs. HUTCHISON addressed the Chair.

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