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Federal Register Modernization Act

Floor Speech

Date: July 14, 2014
Location: Washington, DC
Issues: Technology and Communication Taxes Government Operations

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Mr. ISSA. Thank you. Then I will close.

Mr. Speaker, the Federal Register Modernization Act does exactly what the title suggests--it modernizes the Federal Register Act.

When you look at a well-intended bill that hasn't been addressed since the 1930s, it comes to mind how easy it is to ask something to go on and to have a Federal bureaucracy actually do a good job. The National Archives and many of the institutions here in Washington do work, but from time to time, you ask the question: At what cost?

The Modernization Act seeks to do two things: one, simply lower the cost for printing, which is no longer necessary in a digital age, and, in fact, to open the door for what I believe is the modernization that goes beyond that.

Since 1994, when the Office of the Federal Register first published its electronic edition of the Federal Register, we have, in fact, had an opening for our government to go digital beyond just any minor amount. Today, many people ask the question--and I am going to ask the question here today--if the IRS has 50 years' worth of your tax returns, why wouldn't we capture the workings of government digitally, hold them and, at the appropriate time, make them available for our children and our grandchildren for whatever purpose they may have in studying the history of what we do here today?

This small modernization is about cost savings, but it is also a recognition that, in this day and age, we can capture everything digitally, that we can store vast amounts of it and that we can make it searchable and valuable to the next generation. For that reason, this is a small recognition that it is time to get off paper, to save money and to have the Federal Register accessible online to offices, homes, and public libraries, and not simply to print paper because, in the 1930s, that is what we said to do. I believe, when we look at the last decade, in which the annual page count exceeded 75,000 pages, we recognize that those pages were made possible by the same computers--the same automation--that allow us to no longer print paper.

I ask the Conference and the Congress to vote for H.R. 4195 in order to remove these outdated statutory requirements. I urge its passage.

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