Foolscap Paradise

The Johnson Administration is clearly losing its campaign against documentary inflation. Despite the President's orders to curb what he calls "paperwork run wild," the new agencies, new projects and new functions of the Great Society are piling up Himalayas of foolscap. The House Subcommittee on Census and Statistics, which last week ended a round of hearings on the subject (also voluminous), showed that the Government now prints twelve different forms each year for every American, circulates more than a billion all told, many for eventual return and storage. Washington spends $7 billion annually to make, process and store this material, which totals some 25.5 million cu. ft.--much of it crammed into the Federal Government's 4,000,000 file cabinets.

A single project for a Pentagon airplane design produced 35 tons of documents that took 400 Government employees five months to read and evaluate. Sixty federal agencies have issued at least 1,000 different regulations on the hundreds of types of records that private companies must keep, and the task of filling out Government forms now takes them 95 million man-hours yearly, an 8% increase since 1964. Among the documents required by the Government are the 117 forms that it takes for each ship to enter and clear a U.S. port, some written in language that goes back unchanged to 1799. One of these commits every vessel to include in the crew's mess each Sunday " 3/4 ounce of coffee (green berry), 1/2 pint of molasses, four ounces of onions and one ounce of lard."

A potential hope of defusing the paper explosion is a campaign by the Budget Bureau to make all federal agencies reduce their output of pulp--an effort marshaled by the inauspiciously named Committee to Review the Scope and Effectiveness of Efforts to Minimize Paperwork. Meanwhile, the subcommittee plans to issue a report of its hearings entitled "The Federal Paperwork Jungle," which is expected to consist of more than 200 pages and have an initial press run of 3,000 copies.

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