I am writing these comments which I also shared with ANSI in my individual capacity, but as 

someone who has been involved with these issues for over three decades most of which were 

spent as the lead staffer for competitiveness and standards for the Committee on Science and 

Technology in the House of Representatives and specifically as the lead House staffer for the 

NTTAA and as someone who was actively involved in the revision of OMB Circular A-119. I 

have attached an article I wrote for MIT Press's Innovation which traces competitiveness 

including standards policy from the Ford through the Clinton Administration and which 

presented how I felt standards policy needed to change in 2006. I am pleased that in general the 

Obama Administration's actions related to standards fit well within this general framework. 

However, much still remains to be done. 

General Background. 

The US is unique in the extent that inclusivity is the defining characteristic of its standards 

policy. We have avoided top down standards and have developed the world's most democratic 

standards system which has ANSI at its core including being the organization which has defined 

what a voluntary consensus standard is and which represents the US in international fora 

Therefore, I feel that ANSI, as the one organization that brings together everyone in the United 

States with an interest in standards, is uniquely positioned to assist the Subcommittee in its 

work. Its large membership and board of directors are drawn from every sector of the standards 

community including government agencies, companies and trade associations, standards 

development and accreditation organizations, public interest representatives, and other interested 

parties. The Institute oversees the creation, promulgation and use of thousands of norms and 

guidelines that directly impact every aspect of modern life. ANSI is also actively engaged in 

accrediting programs that assess conformance to standards – including globally-recognized 

cross-sector programs such as the ISO 9000 (quality) and ISO 14000 (environmental) 

management systems. ANSI is also the official U.S. representative to the International 

Organization for Standardization (ISO), the various regional standards and accreditation 

organizations, and, via the U.S. National Committee, the International Electrotechnical 

Commission (IEC). There are literally millions of people related to the ANSI Federation. 

Through this memo I wish to advocate that your committee take the public/private partnership 

that ANSI represents to the next level and explore ways to make ANSI even more valuable to the 

government through full implementation of P.L. 104-113 including finally providing the Federal 

manpower and resources that are necessary to advance our country's common goals related to 

competitiveness of US industry, public health and among government and with the private 

sector as seamless as possible. 
SPECIFIC ISSUES

1. Completing the implementation of PL 104-113.

Background: PL 104-113 and the subsequent related revision of OMB Circular A-119 

established the policy that the government in its regulatory and procurement activities is to use 

voluntary consensus standards to the extent practicable and is to assure they meet government 

needs through active participation in all relevant standards development committees. A 

Secretary of Defense Bill Perry-inspired policy that required voluntary consensus standards to be 

used in Department of Defense procurement specifications was put in place early in the Clinton 

Administration to end the problem of absurdly expensive custom-made items being required 

rather than readily available commercial ones. PL 104-113 and the related revision of Circular 

A-119 to its current form were undertaken to extend DOD's standards practice throughout the 

government for purposes of regulation and procurement.

Although it was not written as broadly as the legislative intent, the OMB Circular A-119 revision 

which followed the enactment of P.L. 104-113 has stood the test of time. OIRA has integrated 

the requirement of a review of existing standards early enough into the regulatory development 

and review processes that existing standards are now routinely used in regulation. Commercial 

products are now also an integral part of Federal procurement. Yet very little has been done to 

fully implement the intent of PL 104-113 by making sure that pertinent, new voluntary 

consensus standards and revisions of existing standards are promulgated in advance of and 

incorporated into government regulations.

Under PL 104-113, the National Institute of Standards and Technology became the lead for 

Federal Government standards activities and chairs the Interagency Committee on Standards 

Policy. Because of the level of participants, these activities tend to be carried out on an 

implementation rather than a strategic policy level. The formation of your NSTC Subcommittee 

makes it timely to revisit the intent of PL 104-113 and to consider using an executive order to 

take care of unfinished business. I suggest an Executive Order because I think it would be a 

huge mistake to open up either PL 104-113 or OMB Circular A-119 to amendment. This is 

because establishing these positions in law and OMB Circular was a very difficult task in which 

we prevailed after several years of effort. Given that both the staff and Committee members who 

would have responsibility for these provisions are inexperienced and that there are many people 

out there who would like to change these laws to their own advantage, I think there is a real risk 

of the general provisions that the law and the circular lay out would be revised in a way that 

takes steps backwards. What needs to be done now is not to change direction, but to put the 

authority of President Obama behind a series of enhancements that can be carried out within the 

scope and intent of current law.
When PL 104-113 was enacted, the US standards development process following ANSI 

guidelines for fairness, openness, transparency, etc. was still relatively slow so it was a prudent 

use of limited resources initially to concentrate on US government use of existing standards in 

their current form and to defer consideration of how PL 104-113 and OMB Circular A-119 need 

also to be used to routinely encourage the revision of existing standards and the creation of new 

ones in advance of the promulgation of new regulations or major procurements. US standards 

development for years has been the best in the world because we bring in and fairly consider the 

technical views and standards needs of all interested parties. The results routinely have been far 

more robust than the top-down standards produced in most of the rest of the world. The 

drawback, using pre-Internet communications technologies, was that the process was time 

consuming. 

This has changed. Both the standards development process and the use of standards are now 

digital and automated. The Internet, XML, and other software have speeded up the standards 

development process to where the best of the standards developers can get a standard from 

concept to promulgation in digital form in a matter of months with no decrease in quality and 

with a great increase in functionality. Standards now routinely are searched, are linked together, 

and are imbedded in design tools. If the government honors the intent of PL 104-113 and works 

with voluntary consensus standards developers from the beginning of the regulatory process, 

there is no reason why most regulations can't rely on completely up to date standards which have 

been customized to meet the needs of the regulators. My expectation is that this level of public 

participation in the standards embodied in regulation will also reduce the number and scope of 

law suits that too often delay the implementation of regulations because the engineering 

questions where the lawyers and courts lack expertise will have been decided by engineers in 

advance of considering the legal and political aspects of the regulations.

Standards are an important tool in our efforts to minimize the burden that government places on 

industry and to increase the ease with which federal government works with the other sectors of 

our society including state and local government. If the standards community is notified when 

Congress or an agency is taking the first steps to develop a new program or a new regulation and 

if appropriate resources are located to do the work, the best of the SDOs are now capable of 

becoming a full partner in improving these programs by making sure the technical standards on 

which a planned program or regulation will depend are created or updated before the regulation 

is scheduled to be finalized. This partnership can make sure the technical underpinnings of the 

standard or regulation are sound, given the current state of related science and technology, 

freeing the policy makers to concentrate on policy. Think about how much simpler the 

regulatory process would be if the technical issues are worked out in advance of the regulatory 

phase. Think how much simpler Health IT, the Smart Grid effort, or regulatory and siting efforts 

related to next generation of nuclear reactors or coal fired plants would be if the government, 

industry, and consumer representatives sat together in the relevant standards development 
committees and worked together on an expedited basis on the standards and conformity 

assessment measures that underpin these programs before any regulatory activities began. 

Recommendations: Put procedures in place that allow appropriate entities in the standards 

community to coordinate on standards development in advance of formal rulemaking. OIRA, 

assisted by NIST and the Subcommittee, could develop an executive order to complement OMB 

Circular A-119 that would establish the structure necessary to make sure that the best available 

standards are available for new regulations. This could include requirements that the agencies 

report to OIRA as part of the regulatory approval process not only on their review of existing 

standards but on their efforts to work with standards developers on making sure the existing 

standards are revised to make them fit government needs and new standards are developed as 

necessary to provide a complete standards basis for the regulation envisioned. This could include 

timetables, government employee participation in the standards development process, and efforts 

to make sure funding is available to avoid delay in standards promulgation. ANSI could be 

NIST's counterpart for private sector coordination including providing a gateway when it is not 

clear what SDO is best equipped to perform the work

2. Fully adopting the spirit of PL 104-113.

To understand the intent of A-119, it is important to realize that the statute in an important way is 

a precursor to the Obama Openness in Government initiative. Its authors looked at the success 

of the Department of Defense in using voluntary consensus standards to break down barriers 

between itself and the business community. By substituting voluntary consensus standards for 

military specifications, the Defense and commercial markets functioned under the same 

specifications and billions of dollars were saved. The authors thought about other areas of 

inefficiency where Federal rules arbitrarily differed from the private sector’s and passed PL 104-

113 to create a common playing field. Agencies like NIST were correct in interpreting the 

statute broadly; NIST began to use Federal Information Processing Standards as an exception 

rather than the rule and the Federal Government, especially after the rewriting of the Brooks Act 

was able to work out a common playing field on IT issues. This accelerated as ARPANET and 

NSFNET were subsumed in the Internet. Unfortunately, some agencies ignore the spirit of PL 

104-113 and A-119 and read the OMB Circular's use of the term 'regulatory activities' very 

narrowly as limited to creating regulations or doing rule writing rather than considering its 

application to all activities that use standards to help the agency carry out its mission. For 

instance programs such as Energy Star will function much better if they are carried out by the 

public and private sectors on a common playing field; it is not just the regulatory aspects of the 

programs where the whole country needs to work together under common rules. 

 
Recommendation. The Subcommittee, OSTP, OMB and affected agencies should consider not 

just the regulations but the programs that use them in the context of Openness in Government 

and A-119. 

3. Federal employee participation in standards writing activity.

Background. The authors of P.L. 104-113 understood that common standards for the public and 

private sector would be effective only if they met the needs of both sectors. The best way to 

assure that government needs are met is to have government employees make their needs known 

and propose language that meets those needs during the drafting of the regulations. This is the 

reason why the language of P.L. 104-113 calls for more extensive agency participation in 

standards development activities which can include agency funding if agencies need standards 

more quickly than would happen under regular order. Since passage of P.L. 104-113, there 

appears to have been a reinterpretation of the Federal Advisory Committee Act in various parts 

of the Executive Branch that has led to differing interpretations of the Act and barriers to public 

private partnerships.

Recommendations. ANSI and its standards developing members should work with the 

Subcommittee on the development of government-wide policies encouraging more Federal 

participation in the development of standards of importance to the government and a revisiting of 

FACA-related policies in light of the importance at this point of expanding public private 

partnerships.

4. Status of Agency Standards Officers.

Background. Addressing the first three issues requires a determined focus on them within 

agencies at a cross-agency policy level by individuals at a high enough rank within the agencies 

to be taken seriously.

Recommendation. The Subcommittee Members should each be asked to investigate how the 

subcommittee recommendations will be carried out within their agencies and adjust the status of 

those involved to where they can be effective in the implementation.
5. Openness in Government

Background: Standards are the technical underpinning for openness in government and the 

Subcommittee with the support of NIST could play a key role in making sure this important 

initiative has the technical support it needs to be successful. NIST has experts in web 2.0 

standards and provided government representatives to the standards writng committees that 

promulgated them. NIST also has been the secretariat for the CIO Council and is connected with 

the people who have to carry out these policies. Finally, for years NIST coordinated the 

development of Federal Information Processing Standards which before OMB Circular A-119’s 

revision provided a common set of IT rules for government and still do to the extent that federal 

supplements to private sector IT standards are needed. 

The Subcommittee is an important complement to NIST’s work in this area because it brings 

together the high level officials that set the overall policy that the CIO Council and the FIPS help 

carry out. The Subcommittee is a logical area to think through what the government needs to do 

to set up common platforms to move towards seamlessness in public private interactions. Three 

examples of areas worth looking at follow.

The Subcommittee would be a logical place to think through improvement of gateways to the 

government that the rest of the country can use. Government websites vary from primitive to 

state-of-the-art. Within NIST there is also quite a spread of website functionality. NIST data 

bases connected with those of the American Chemical Society that have millions of hits per year; 

others go for years before being updated. 

A couple years ago, it became clear to some in the federal standards community that the web had 

made obsolete most federal recurring reporting requirements. Rather than have the public wait a 

year for annual reports, it made much more sense to provide routinely updated information on 

web sites in electronic searchable form and so that interested parties could develop their own 

reports that were customized to their own needs. 

Recommendations. Have the Subcommittee commission a study of best practices of Federal 

websites and requested development of a FIPS that lays out what is expected of agencies in 

making data bases accessible and as well as other on-line ways of sharing information. Have the 

Subcommittee commission a study of WIKI and other web 2.0 related technology would explore 

if there is a way to cut out the middleman in Federal reporting. This would involve letting let 

government employees, their grantees and contractors post and update information on a 
particular topic in a setting that was monitored for quality, security, and accuracy, thereby 

providing the same type of instantly up to date information that is available today on other 

WIKIs. NIST and ANSI could also work together on migrating government coordination with 

its customers to the web in a manner that is consistent with the Open Government Initiative and 

standard ways that companies, universities, states, and others maintain their data. This type of 

web site could replace after the fact reporting requirements with a real-time look for the public 

on progress towards developing the standards necessary for major government initiatives such as 

smart grid or health IT. Although it is a tougher problem, there is a fortune to be saved if 

common standards for maintaining data related to government grants and contracts are developed 

for all programs that permit the government to mine the data as needed rather than requiring the 

contractors and grantees to write reports that quickly become dated.

6. Re-engineering Government/Lean Six Sigma 

Background: At this point, it is pretty clear that quality (especially lean/six sigma) principles 

apply as much to the government and service sector as they do to the manufacturing sector. See

http://www.scienceprogress.org/2008/04/quality-and-ingenuity-are-intertwined/ where Maryann 

Feldman and I lay our the basic argument. For years, a Federal Quality Award, administered by 

OIRA, rewarded those government programs that best embodied quality principles. However, 

during the George W. Bush years, the Federal Quality Award was repurposed and made an 

award for those agencies that did best under the GPRA process, thereby making the FQA an 

excellence in bureaucracy award rather than a quality award. The quality portion of the award 

was effectively suspended and the OIRA staff that was OMB’s repository of quality expertise 

was dispersed. Ironically that same Administration in its response to Hurricane Katrina 

unintentionally demonstrated just how important quality training is in the public sector. FEMA, 

perhaps the ultimate bureaucracy under Bush II, was clueless when the big storm hit. The Coast 

Guard, on the other hand, an agency that had emphasized quality training and meeting the needs 

of its customers and is the home to many six sigma black belts, performed flawlessly, conducting 

hundreds of successful emergency rescue and other operations under the same conditions that 

FEMA faced.

Lean Six Sigma presents a unique opportunity for the Obama Administration to promote both 

efficiency in government and openness in government. Its strong focus on the needs of internal 

and external customers and its heavy focus on reengineering and heavy use of IT to meet the 

needs of customers provides a systematic means of implementing much of what the Obama 

Administration hopes to accomplish in these areas. Openness in government will also be much 

easier if the government operates under the same lean/six sigma standards as the private sector 

and can tie in as appropriate into supply and value chains. The ultimate in openness in 

government will be when the Federal government can operate seamlessly with those who depend 
on it and its services including delivering approvals and regulatory services real-time and always 

in advance of when they are needed.

The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, headquartered in NIST, since the mid-1980s has 

functioned as a national standard for best business practices. Three or four years ago it was 

extended to the non-profit sector including government at all levels and now the award 

guidelines are the standard for optimization in all parts of the economy and for how individual 

companies, universities, non-profits, or government agencies can best interface with all of their 

customers and clients. The Baldrige Award has always functioned as the Super Bowl of quality. 

Winners of the award spend years honing their quality by implementing Baldrige principles and 

by competing for state and other lesser quality awards. It is designed to reward the cream of the 

crop in quality and this should be so in the public sector as well as in the private sector. 

Recommendation: The Subcommittee could advocate for the implementation of Lean/Six 

Sigma throughout government, revival of the Federal Quality Award program, and use of 

Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award measurement tools as a way to bring the government 

in step with the national quality standard. It could show that it is serious about openness and 

efficiency in government by promoting an executive order to create chief quality officers within 

all agencies, preferably in agency front offices. This would both show that the Administration is 

serious about improving the functioning and efficiency of government and that the White House 

and agency heads expect quality and continuous improvement to be hallmarks of government as 

well as of leading companies. In some cases the chief quality officer title could be added to the 

existing responsibility to existing officials. The chief quality officer would be the quality 

facilitator in their agencies, encouraging all parts of the agency to adopt quality principles. I 

recommend reestablishing the Federal Quality Award to honor the best portions of agencies and 

requiring a FQA for government entities to compete for the Baldrige. FQA might also be open 

to state programs that use federal funds to implement Federal policy.

7. Standards are also important in bringing various levels of government together. For instance, 

if we are serious about regional economic development we need a set of standards that let state 

and local government, federal agencies, universities, and local businesses to work together 

seamlessly and get permits and regulatory approval just in time. 

Jim Turner 

Jim Turner, Senior Counsel and Director of Energy Programs 

Association of Public and Land Grant Universities 

1307 New York Avenue NW, 4th Floor 

Washington, DC 20005 
jameshturnerjr@gmail.com

202-478-6049 APLU 

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