STATEMENT OF PETER G. LEFEVRE LAW REVISION COUNSEL OF THE U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES to the Subcommittee on Legislative Branch of the House Committee on Appropriations
Madam Chairwoman and members of the Subcommittee, it is a pleasure to appear before you to present the budget request of the Office of the Law Revision Counsel for fiscal year 2009. Budget Request I am requesting $3,057,000 for the Office for fiscal year 2009. This is an increase of $125,000 (4.3 percent) over funding for fiscal year 2008, almost all of which is to cover projected increases in personnel expenses for cost of living adjustments and meritorious pay increases. The request projects non-personnel costs similar to fiscal year 2008 and provides funding to continue service contracts with former employees and outside consultants for editorial and technical support and for XML development projects. Functions of the Office As provided by chapter 9A of title 2 of the United States Code, the Office has two principal functions: (1) maintaining the official version of the Code, and (2) preparing legislation, for submission to the Committee on the Judiciary, to enact individual titles of the Code into positive law. Maintaining the United States Code The United States Code contains the general and permanent laws of the United States, organized into titles by subject matter. The function of maintaining the Code itself subdivides into two main tasks: (1) Classifying New Laws. The first involves reading every law enacted by Congress to determine which provisions should be classified to the Code and where in the Code they should be placed. The Office gives the highest priority to this classification function. Pending legislation is constantly monitored so that the classification of laws can normally be completed by the time they are signed by the President. While speed is important so that classifications can be included
in the printed slip laws and quickly made available to private publishers and the public, accuracy is even more important. Typically, three or four attorneys carefully review each law to make sure that all appropriate classifications are made and that nothing is missed. (2) Updating the Text. The second task in maintaining the Code involves updating the actual text of the Code. This includes not only updating the text of the law, but also preparing extensive editorial material. This editorial material includes statutory citations and amendment notes to help users track the legislative history, other notes to explain such things as effective dates, transfers of functions, and a variety of other matters, tables to help users determine the status of statutory provisions and locate them in the Code, and an index. The Office publishes, in printed form, a complete new version of the Code once every six years and annual cumulative supplements in intervening years. The most recent main edition of the Code was well over 40,000 pages. The Office also publishes the Code on its web site and in the form of an annual CD-ROM. A major concern during recent years has been the amount of time it takes for new laws to be integrated into the Code. No one shares that concern more than the members of our Office who have been acutely aware that the timeliness of the Code was slipping for a number of years. This was a consequence of an increasing work load, no new FTEs for over 19 years, and an unusually large turnover of experienced staff due to retirements and unexpected departures. The Office has done a number of things to address this concern. It has hired and trained nine new employees since 2003 to replace retiring and departing staff. It has asked this subcommittee for two additional FTEs, one of which was approved in 2007 and the other last month. It has contracted with former employees to help with the editorial work, and it has streamlined procedures and eliminated certain features and content of the Code which were of a relatively low priority. As a result, progress has been made in updating the Code more quickly, although there is still a long way to go. The most recent sign of progress is the completion of the latest supplement of the Code two to three months earlier than the prior supplement. Looking ahead, I believe that the Office is well positioned to continue improving the timeliness of the Code over the next few years. Positive Law Codification The other principal function of the Office is to prepare legislation to enact individual titles of the United States Code into positive law. When the Code was first adopted in 1926, it was declared to be only prima facie evidence of the law, and the statutes on which it was based were not repealed. Beginning in 1947, Congress started enacting individual titles of the Code into positive law and repealing the statutes on which those titles were based. When a title is enacted into positive law, it is elevated from prima facie to legal evidence of the law. Thus far, 24 of the 50 titles of the Code have been enacted into positive law, but those titles represent only about 30 percent of the volume of law in the Code. Much work remains to complete the enactment of the remainder of the Code into positive law.
The process of preparing a bill to enact a title into positive law is arduous and time consuming. The attorney must identify all statutory material relating to the subject matter of the new title and make judgments about what to include or exclude. All of this material, which typically comes from many different laws enacted over many years, must be organized in a logical way in the new title. Each provision must be carefully analyzed, and decisions must be made about whether certain provisions have become obsolete or superseded by later law. Early in the process, the attorney also must identify all parties, both in and outside of government, who may have an interest in the project, and must develop good lines of communication and trust. Our Office seeks as much input as possible throughout the drafting process. Depending on the size of the bill, it may take a year or more just to prepare a bill for introduction. Following introduction of one of our bills by the Chairman of the Committee on the Judiciary, our Office continues to provide whatever support the Committee may desire. We study all public comments received and discuss the issues with those submitting the comments in order to achieve a satisfactory resolution. We draft whatever amendments may be required for markup, and also draft the committee report. When a bill passes the House and goes to the Senate, we also contact the Senate staffers in order to provide information and assistance as they consider the bill. In March 2007, our Office delivered four bills to the Judiciary Committee, explaining that three of the bills had already been through public comment periods in one or more prior Congresses. We therefore recommended that those three were ready for enactment. The four bills can be briefly described as follows: (1) Title 46 - Shipping. This was a small (22 page) bill which was a follow-up to a title 46 codification bill enacted in 2006. This follow-up bill was a successor to a similar bill that had been introduced in the prior Congress. This bill was introduced in August 2007 and reported in November 2007. However, earlier in the year, the Maritime Administration decided to include the contents of this bill in its proposed annual authorization bill, and that bill was in turn added to the defense authorization bill which became law in January 2008, thus making the Judiciary Committee version unnecessary. (2) Title 41 - Public Contracts. This was a successor to a bill introduced in the 108th Congress and introduced and reported in the 109th Congress. This successor bill was introduced in the current Congress in December 2007. (3) Title 51 - Space. This was a successor to a bill introduced in the 109th Congress. It too was introduced in the current Congress in December 2007. (4) Title 35 - Trademarks. This was a new bill which adds material to title 35 (which is already positive law) based on material from title 15. This bill has not yet been introduced. In addition to the bills just described, which were delivered to the Committee in March 2007, the Office is currently preparing new bills relating to the following subjects: (1) Small Business, (2)
Voting and Elections, (3) National Parks, and (4) Environment. These bills should be ready to deliver to the Committee during 2008. The statutory mandate of the Office is to prepare codification legislation and submit it to the Committee on the Judiciary. Once this legislation is submitted, it is the Chairman's prerogative to give it whatever priority is considered appropriate. I believe, after having worked so closely with the United States Code for the last 27 years, that it would be a great benefit to the Congress and the public if the process of enacting more titles of the Code into positive law could proceed at a faster pace. XML Conversion The budget request also includes an amount to continue the long-term effort to replace GPO photocomposition codes with XML. GPO photocomposition codes have been used in the production and printing of legislative materials, including the United States Code, for at least the last 25 years. A few years ago, the House and the Senate decided to move to XML as the standard format for legislative documents, and GPO has been refocusing its support away from photocomposition codes and toward XML. Several congressional offices are now well on their way to making this transition. At the end of fiscal year 2006, the Office contracted for the first stages of what will likely be a multi-year project. These first stages include developing a DTD for the United States Code, developing a program to convert the Code data to XML, and developing a rudimentary style sheet sufficient only to help evaluate the quality of the DTD and conversion program. The work on that contract was performed mostly during 2007 and is expected to be completed within a few months. Assuming the quality is satisfactory, the plans for the next stage are to perfect the conversion and style sheet and use the XML data to build a much improved web site for the Code. Additional long range plans include developing procedures and software to produce the Code in XML as its native format. This transition to XML is expected ultimately to assist this Office in updating the Code and to assist other congressional offices and the public in using the Code. Conclusion Finally, I would like to thank the Subcommittee for giving me the opportunity to present the fiscal year 2009 budget request of the Office of the Law Revision Counsel and for the Subcommittee’s support for the Office. I will be pleased to respond to any questions that you may have.