Nation's public printer institutes changes at GPO

WASHINGTON -- Before taking over as the nation's public printer, Bruce James promised the White House and Congress he would retool and modernize the historic Government Printing Office.

After six months, he noted he has recruited six of 12 top GPO managers from the private sector, and kept just two of the other six in the same jobs as when he took over in December.

"We now have square pegs in square holes," James said during a recent dinner that he and his wife, Nora, hosted for his managers at a Washington, D.C., restaurant. "I feel we're just getting things in motion."

James, 60, a Nevada resident who in 1998 abandoned a short-lived candidacy for U.S. Senate, accepted President Bush's nomination late last year as the nation's 24th public printer, his title as head of the GPO.

The agency, which opened in 1861, oversees the production of government documents as massive as the annual federal budget and as personal as passports. The GPO also disseminates government information to depository libraries around the country.

James is a lifelong printing enthusiast who has a scar on his left wrist from a teenage hot-type accident -- and a yearning for politics.

He made $35 million introducing computer technologies to print communication, and must now transform an agency that experts say has been slow to keep pace with the modern information economy.

"I have come to the conclusion that this is going to be the best job I have ever had, and the reason is, it's the toughest," he said during a Senate budget review in March.

James moved to Nevada in the early 1990s, after founding a series of publishing companies in California and retiring at age 50. He lives on the north shore of Lake Tahoe in a home once owned by Howard Hughes. He is devoted to philanthropy and education.

He became widely known after he announced his candidacy for U.S. Senate in the summer of 1997. He battled John Ensign in a Republican primary campaign before withdrawing in February 1998.

James never has been associated with a money-losing enterprise, and never operated in an organized labor environment. At the GPO, he finds himself dealing with 16 unions, 23 bargaining units and a shrinking work force.

The agency once employed 9,000, but now has 3,000 nationwide, with more cuts planned. Some of his staff can't read or write.

The GPO lost more than $40 million in the past three years.

Paul Light, a bureaucracy expert at the Brookings Institution, said James faces a big challenge.

"Good luck to him," Light said. "Washington is littered with the resumes of bold innovators who enter office promising to end decades of bureaucracy and are quickly rubbed out, erased -- reset, to use a printer's term."

James, an expansive man who has been known to strike up conversations with strangers at crosswalks, sees his progress differently.

"I'm a little ahead of where I expected to be," he said, considering his first six months at the 1.5 million-square-foot GPO headquarters and printing plant five blocks from the U.S. Capitol.

James took the GPO job after being promised a free hand hiring his managers. He revived employee incentive and training programs, reorganized to increase efficiency, initiated college recruiting and asked Congress for $10 million to offer 300 workers early retirement buyouts.

He even jazzed up the GPO logo.

Early in June, he completed an agreement that could settle decades of infighting with the White House budget office over federal agency printing.

James is a tonic for the GPO, said Ben Cooper, executive vice president for public policy at the Printing Industries of America.

"He's a big thinker and the GPO needs somebody who can think creatively," Cooper said.

The GPO work force reacted cautiously to James. Many lifelong GPO employees wonder where they fit into his vision of the future, said George Lord, chairman of a joint union council representing 1,400 blue-collar workers.

Some wince when James tells them the GPO needs to abandon 19th century thinking and advance to the 21st century.

"For someone in a leadership position, his frankness sometimes works against him," Lord said.

Preparing for the post, James sought advice from Danny Thompson, secretary-treasurer of the Nevada AFL-CIO, about how to work with organized labor.

"I am trying to embrace all the employees while making these changes," James said. "We don't do a serious meeting here without having the union leadership in the meeting."

James is complimentary of the GPO force and the history of an agency that still has the printing plates used to print the Emancipation Proclamation and other historical documents.

But he said he was surprised at some hiring practices.

"When I walked in the door, we were still hiring people who were illiterate," he said, "and by illiterate, I mean people who cannot read and write. Of course, this is defenseless."

Andrew Sherman, GPO director of congressional and public affairs, said the government does not test literacy for warehouse and custodial jobs. He said applicants need only to be able to follow oral and written instructions.

James said he spends up to 80 percent of his time planning for the agency's future, which he is convinced will involve less and less actual printing.

Speaking at a library conference in Reno a month ago, James said that this year for the first time more than half the government's documents will be produced only in digital form.

Within five years, only 5 percent will be inked on paper, he said.

Interviewed in his large, wood-paneled office, James said the GPO was developing projects to revolutionize the record of America.

"By next spring, I'll be ready to lay out something that will knock your socks off," he said. "We will not just lead the government, we'll lead the private sector and the whole world."

He said he is committed to the GPO for three to five years, and said he expects to leave an agency that won't fall backward, but will be "systemic and sustainable."

James said he'll return to Nevada, and he continues to have an interest in politics.

"There are probably only two jobs I would have, senator or governor," he said. But he said he has not planned that far ahead.