James Leads GPO Into 21st Century; Enticed out of retirement to head the Government Printing Office, Bruce James is newly energized by the challenge of getting his agency to embrace technology

Insight on the News, Feb 2, 2004

Byline: Stephen Goode, INSIGHT

On Jan. 9, 2003, Bruce James was sworn as the 24th public printer of the United States. The agency he heads, the Government Printing Office (GPO), prints the Congressional Record and all other official U.S. government documents, which includes everything from Department of Agriculture reports on fertilizers and beef production to the texts of treaties to which the United States becomes party and the code of federal regulations.

It is a huge task, the full extent of which can be seen at the agency's Website www.access.gpo.gov. The GPO has 1,700 employees nationwide and an annual budget of $729 million for 2004.

James has an exceptional background in printing to call upon to reform an agency that's fallen behind technologically and has, in recent years, been in noticeable decline. James got his first printing press when he was 11. By the time he was a teen-ager he was running his own printing business with the help of high-school friends he hired. Among the 13 enterprises that he has founded, developed and managed are the Uniplan Corp. (founded 1973) and the Electrographic Corp. (1983), both of San Francisco.

Uniplan pioneered the use of mainframe computers for text and graphics processing and electronic image generation. Electrographic provided worldwide electronic-information gathering, processing and distribution services for the publishing and banking industries. And James' 11 other enterprises equally were technologically innovative, including the Polish-American Printing Co. of Warsaw, Poland, founded in 1990 at the request of then-president George H.W. Bush, who sought to help Poland's then-president Lech Walesa in the newly free country.

Ten years ago, at the age of 50, James retired. "I wanted to devote the last half of my life to public service," he tells Insight. "Also, I didn't want to continue in the very stressful environment that it takes to run your own business."

Since that time, James has served on the board of directors of his alma mater, Rochester Institute of Technology, where he remains chairman. He is on the board of Sierra Nevada College in Lake Tahoe, near where he and his wife make their home. He's also run (unsuccessfully) as a Republican for U.S. senator from Nevada, a task he pursued with his characteristic thoroughness: "I visited every town in the state that had a population of 100 and over."

Insight interviewed James at his office in the GPO building five blocks from the U.S. Capitol. With 1.5 million square feet of space, the GPO is the largest information processing, printing and distribution facility in the world. "I think folks here are very interested in making this into more of a regular business and in learning what is necessary to do that," says James.

Insight: What is the GPO and how do you see your role as its 24th director?

Bruce James: It's interesting. The roots of what you see here go back to the beginning of the country. According to the Constitution, each house of Congress "shall keep a journal of its proceedings and from time to time publish the same." The only exception are the parts, as the Constitution says, which may in Congress' "judgment require secrecy."

In 1813 a series of laws was passed by Congress that basically said that to protect the republic the government was not allowed to hide information. As part of this openness the government had to publish and make widely available all government documents - except anything that formally was secret, of course, for security reasons. Congress established a series of depositories, two of them in each state. Each of these depositories was to receive one copy of every document published by the government, and it was their job to preserve those documents in perpetuity and to make them available to anybody who walked in the front door.

Today we have almost 1,300 such depositories. Fifty-three of them are regional and get one copy of every government document. If you go up to the counter and ask for a document that was published in 1898, they'll go and get it for you while you're standing right there at the counter.

So that's what we are. We've faced technological changes before. In the early 1800s, printing was all handset type, one letter at a time. The linotype machine came along late in that century, and it took about a decade to adapt. Then in the 1960s came the photo typesetting machine. And now the Internet is here, and what we've done here is use technology to make things easier, faster and smoother. But we really have not embraced all the gains we could possibly make with the computer.

And therein lies the challenge. It's a challenge not just for the GPO but the entire federal government. How does the federal government remake itself into the 21st century? The challenges facing the GPO aren't unusual in that respect at all.

Q: So basically what you're doing is redefining the GPO's mission to fit what it means to be at the cutting edge of developments in electronic communications?