A printer makes his mark: GPO has been transformed, thanks to the indelible leadership of Bruce James

Public Manager, The, Spring, 2007 by Carl A. Fillichio

We conducted a major workforce restructuring involving three highly successful retirement incentive programs that reduced our staffing by more than 630 positions, or more than 20 percent. With a portion of the savings, we created a range of new positions to help move the agency forward. We carefully recruited for those positions and successfully brought on board personnel with new talents and skills, both from within and outside the government, in technology and systems integration, finance, marketing, secure and intelligent documents, digital media, and related fields, which have been fundamental to our transformation efforts.

With this new agency leadership, we created an Office of Innovation and Technology to identify new technologies and practices to help us move forward. We initiated several broad-scale evaluations to help determine our future course, ranging from reviewing the suitability of our current buildings to analyzing the scope of our relationships with other government printing and information organizations and how they should be retooled in a digital environment.

We redoubled our training programs to help us shape the staffing capabilities we will need for the future, and successfully obtained additional congressional appropriations to underwrite workforce development aimed at providing digital skills. To communicate our new direction and purpose, we created a new logo to show that GPO fully embraces the twenty-first century.

We moved quickly to communicate our new commitment to the Congress, federal agencies, and the public we serve. One of our early achievements was the resolution of a long-standing controversy with the executive branch over federal printing through the establishment of a more cooperative working relationship with federal agencies.

We also began a continuing round of meetings and briefings for Members of Congress, heads of federal agencies, representatives of the printing industry, the library and information communities, employee representatives, and others to discuss how we could improve the services we provide, and to forge new business relationships.

Cumulative losses at GPO by the time I had arrived totaled over $100 million in the late 1990s. The retirement incentive programs we carried out cut GPO's payroll costs by approximately $46 million annually, setting us on the road to recovery. Recognizing the public's preference for accessing government information via the Internet, we closed GPO's ailing retail bookstores. Other cost-saving efforts were undertaken to restore GPO to a positive financial footing.

It took us a year, but by the end of 2004 we had restored GPO's finances to a positive basis for the first time in five years. We repeated that performance in 2005, generating an even larger net income, and a positive financial outlook is on track for this year. Few if any other federal agencies can make that claim, and it's a result that would be the envy of many a private-sector company as well.

GAO Study of Federal Printing