GPO’s mission includes both printing government documents and disseminating them to the public. Under 44 U.S.C. 501, it is the principal agent for printing for the federal government. All printing for the Congress, the executive branch, and the judiciary—except for the Supreme Court—is to be done or contracted by GPO except for authorized exemptions. The Superintendent of Documents, who heads GPO’s Information Dissemination organization, disseminates these government products to the public through a system of 1,200 depository libraries nationwide (the Federal Depository Library Program), GPO’s Web site (GPO Access), telephone and fax ordering, an online ordering site, and its bookstore in Washington, D.C. The Superintendent of Documents is also responsible for classification and bibliographic control of tangible and electronic government publications. Printing and related services. In providing printing and binding services to the government, GPO generally dedicates its in-house printing equipment to congressional printing, contracting out most printing for the executive branch. Table 1 shows the costs of these services in fiscal year 2003, as well as the source of these printing services. Printing and binding for the Congress are funded by appropriations; in fiscal year 2004, this appropriation was $90.6 million, and the amount requested for fiscal year 2005 is $88.8 million. Documents printed for the Congress include the Congressional Record, hearing transcripts, bills, resolutions, amendments, and committee reports, among other things. GPO also provides publishing support staff to the Congress; these support staff mainly perform print preparation activities, such as typing, scanning, proofreading, and preparation of electronic data for transmission to GPO. In addition, GPO provides electronic copies of the Congressional Record and other documents to the Congress, the public, and the depository libraries in accordance with the Government Printing Office Electronic Information Access Enhancement Act of 1993. GPO generally provides printing services to federal agencies through contracting. GPO procures about 83 percent of printing for federal agencies from private contractors and does the remaining 17 percent at its own plant facilities. Most of the procured printing jobs (85 percent for the period from June 2002 to May 2003) were for under $2,500 each. There is no appropriation to cover federal agency printing services. Instead, GPO levies a service charge to federal agency customers of its procurement services. The service charge is GPO’s only authorized source of funds to pay for the services it provides to agencies. The service charge is intended to cover the cost of specialized printing procurement services that GPO provides to agencies. These services include developing printing specifications and providing quality assurance functions, both of which require printing expertise that agencies often do not have. Procuring printing is more specialized than general procurement, because all printing jobs are custom: that is, printing cannot be bought “off the shelf,” like furniture or office supplies. Developing printing specifications requires specialized knowledge of paper and ink qualities, printing presses, and printing processes, for example. Besides printing, GPO provides a range of related services to agencies, including, for example, CD-ROM development and production, archiving/storage, converting products to electronic format, Web hosting, and Web page design and development. Dissemination of government information. The Superintendent of Documents is responsible for the acquisition, classification, dissemination, and bibliographic control of tangible and electronic government publications. Regardless of the printing source, Title 44 requires that federal agencies make all their publications available to the Superintendent of Documents for cataloging and distribution. The Superintendent of Documents manages a number of programs related to distribution, including the Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP), which designates libraries across the country to receive copies of government publications for public use. Generally, documents distributed to the libraries are those that contain information regarding U.S. government activities or are important reference publications. GPO evaluates documents to determine whether they should be disseminated to the depository libraries. When documents are printed through GPO, it evaluates them at the time of printing; if documents are not printed through GPO, Title 44 requires agencies to notify it of these documents, so that it can evaluate them and arrange to receive any copies needed for distribution. A relatively small percentage of the items printed through GPO for the executive branch are designated as depository items. Another distribution program under the Superintendent of Documents is the Document Sales Service, which purchases, warehouses, sells, and distributes government documents. Publications are sold by mail, telephone, and fax; through GPO’s online bookstore; and at its bookstore in Washington, D.C. The Superintendent of Documents is also responsible for GPO’s Web site, GPO Access, which is one mechanism for electronic dissemination of government documents to the public through links to over 240,000 individual titles on GPO’s servers and other federal Web sites. More than 1.6 billion documents have been retrieved by the public from GPO Access since August 1994; almost 372 million downloads of government information from GPO Access were made in fiscal year 2002 alone. About two-thirds of new FDLP titles are available online. Current industry trends show that the total volume of printed material has been declining for the past few years and that this trend is expected to continue. A major factor in this declining volume is the use of electronic media options. More organizations are creating electronic documents for dissemination or publishing their information directly to the Web. The reason for the switch to electronic publishing and dissemination is that once a document is created electronically, the costs associated with reproducing and distributing paper copies of it are greater than the costs of providing online access to it. Therefore, many organizations are making information available electronically and printing fewer documents, moving away from print-centric processes. The move to electronic dissemination is the latest phase in the electronic publishing revolution that has transformed the printing industry in recent decades. This revolution was driven by the development of increasingly sophisticated electronic publishing (or “desktop publishing”) software, run on personal computers, that allows users to design documents including both images and text, and the parallel development of electronic laser printer/copier technology with capabilities that approach those of high-end presses. These tools allow users to produce documents that formerly would have required hand work, professional printing expertise, and large printing systems. These technologies have brought major economic and industrial changes to the printing industry. As electronic publishing software becomes increasingly sophisticated, user-friendly, and reliable, it approaches the ideal of the print customer being able to produce files that can be reproduced on the press with little or no intervention by printing professionals As the printing process is simplified, the customer can take responsibility for more of the work. Thus, the technologies diminish the value that printing organizations like GPO add to the printing process, particularly for simpler printing jobs. Nonetheless, professional expertise remains critical for many aspects of printing, and for many print jobs it is still not possible to bypass the printing professional altogether. The advent of the Web and the Internet, however, permits the instantaneous distribution of the electronic documents produced by the new publishing processes, breaking the link between printing and dissemination. As the Web has become virtually ubiquitous, the electronic dissemination of information becomes not only practical, but more economical than dissemination on paper. As a result, many organizations are changing from a print to an electronic focus. In the early stages of the electronic publishing revolution, organizations tended to prepare a document for printing and then convert the print layout to electronic form—in other words, focusing on printing rather than dissemination. Increasingly, however, organizations are changing their focus to providing information—not necessarily on paper. Today an organization may employ computers to generate plates used for printing as well as electronic files for dissemination. Tomorrow, the organization may create only an electronic representation of the information, which can be disseminated through various media, such as Web sites. A printed version would be produced only upon request. GPO’s Public Printer—confirmed by the Senate in November 2002— has initiated efforts to modernize and prepare GPO for the 21st century. The Public Printer has initiated a reorganization with a chief executive officer (Public Printer), chief operating officer, and managing directors in addition to the Superintendent of Documents. The Public Printer and his management team also reorganized the agency into three customer-focused functional areas (Customer Services, Information Dissemination, and Plant Operations) and three support areas (Information Technology and Systems, Finance and Administration, and Human Resources). According to GPO, this interim restructuring will be used during a 2-year transitional phase. During this time, further decisions will be made about its future and organizational alignment. According to GPO officials, the Public Printer has also initiated efforts to develop a strategic plan to guide its transformation efforts. These efforts include ● conducting fact-finding activities to support plan development, ● convening meetings of top management to discuss and document the “as-is” state of the organization, and ● finalizing the plan by December 2004. In keeping with overall industry trends, the volume of material provided to GPO to print has diminished in recent years and is creating financial challenges for the agency. According to GPO, its federal agency print jobs at one time generated close to $1 billion a year. In fiscal year 2003, the amount was just over half of that—$570 million. Federal agencies are publishing more items directly to the Web—without creating paper documents at all—and are doing more of their printing and dissemination of information without using GPO services. This reduction in demand has resulted in GPO’s procured printing business, which was once financially self- sustaining, experiencing losses in 3 of the past 5 years, with a net loss of $15.8 million over that period. Similar changes have affected its sales program. The introduction of GPO Access, which allows downloading and printing of documents at no cost, has contributed to major losses to the sales program in recent years.