what your agencies are doing. And basically what we do is coordinate that effort. We do not sit there in judgment on them.

Chairman GLENN. I have no more questions. I am appreciative that you were here this afternoon. Thank you very much for your testimony.

I would just close by saying that this is a continuing issue that the Committee will be looking at, and I say this quite apart from politics or from Bush, Dukakis, Reagan or anybody else. The Committee has been very concerned that the OMB function be kept to coordination and arbitration of disputes on overlapping jurisdictions which creep into some of the legislation that goes out of here. We are very concerned that regulation have a point of coordination and that that be OMB. But the ideological concerns that a particular president or administration may have should not overcome the major objectives of laws passed by Congress. Can we not wind up with OMB being an ideological organization in pursuit of certain goals which the President may not be able to get through the Congress.

So we are going to be continuing our oversight of OMB, whoever the new president, whatever the new administration may be in the new year. And we will undoubtedly have more hearings next year. I think, also, just as a general statement, we certainly should review this issue more often than once every 12 or 13 years. As I said, the last time we did anything like this was in 1977. I had been on this Committee just a couple of years at that time. One of the actions we took at that time, which Ms. Claybrook objected to-I did not ask her a further question about this-was the sunsetting of some of these commissions, boards, councils, and other information developing groups in Government.

One of the problems we had when I first came on this Committee was we found some 1,600 boards, commissions, councils, and groups, of all kinds and shapes; some of them had been on the books for many, many years, serving very little purpose. After looking at these things over a couple of years, we were able to eliminate, as you recall, somewhere around 400 of those councils that weren't doing any good but spending a lot of money-people who had a couple of meetings a year, floated back and forth across this country for little real purpose, and spent a lot of money doing it. We eliminated many of those. And at that time, to prevent this thing from growing back out of control again, we put some sunset legislation in-legislation that said that councils formed were to perform their duty and if they were worthy of being reauthorized again, we would take them up and reauthorize them. If not, they sunset.

I did not get back to Ms. Claybrook on this topic because of our limited questioning period here, but that is what we were faced with at the time. I know more information needs to be developed in some of these areas. I do not want to prevent that information from being developed.

On the other hand, I do not want to see this whole Government growing out of control again, either.

Mr. PLAGER. Exactly.

Chairman GLENN. So we share that goal.

Mr. PLAGER. Mr. Chairman, if I could just make one point, which is that my personal belief is that whoever the President is, and regardless of any given President's ideology, that president will find that if he or she wants to manage the Government effectively and carry out the Congress' will, he or she has got to have some kind of a coordinating, review mechanism equivalent to what we now have. They may change the name. They may fiddle with the design. But my own view is that we may not like the individual decisions in any given case but the overall management of the Executive Branch and the ability to carry out the Congressional legislation depends on having some kind of central coordinative review mechanism.

I am delighted to have had the opportunity to come to this hearing.

Chairman GLENN. Thank you. And I do not disagree with you at all on that. I share a concern that things be done at one spot so we can coordinate them best. The problem is if that one spot gets a little over exuberant with regard to ideology and not just carrying out the mandate of law, then we are duty-bound at this end of the avenue-whoever is in the White House-to bring that up and talk about it a little bit and see if we cannot correct it.

Thank you very much, the hearing will stand in recess subject to the call of the chair.

[Whereupon, at 4 p.m., the hearing was recessed subject to the call of the Chair.]

To provide for an alternative to the present adversarial rule making procedure by establishing a process to facilitate the formation of negotiated rule making committees.

IN THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES

JULY 17 (legislative day, JUNE 23), 1987

Mr. LEVIN (for himself, Mr. COHEN, Mr. GRASSLEY, and Mr. RIEGLE) introduced the following bill; which was read twice and referred to the Committee on Governmental Affairs

A BILL

To provide for an alternative to the present adversarial rule making procedure by establishing a process to facilitate the formation of negotiated rule making committees.

1 Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representa2 tives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, 3 That this Act may be cited as the "Negotiated Rule Making 4 Act of 1987".

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(2) Although the purpose of regulation has been to promote the safety and general welfare of the Ameri

can public, the rule making process tends to discourage parties from meeting and communicating with each other, and this leads to the assumption by parties with different interests of conflicting and antagonistic positions toward agency rules, which may result in expensive and time consuming litigation.

(3) The adversarial nature of rule making deprives the affected parties and the public at large from the benefits of face-to-face negotiations and cooperation in developing and reaching agreement on a rule.

(4) The adversarial nature of rule making also deprives the affected parties and the public from the benefits of shared information, knowledge, expertise, and technical abilities possessed by the affected parties.

(5) A proposed rule developed and negotiated by the parties who are affected by the rule will increase the acceptability and enforceability of the rule by those parties, and affected interests will be less likely to resist enforcement or challenge the rule in court.

(6) Although many agencies already have the authority to establish negotiated rule making committees pursuant to the laws authorizing such agencies and

their programs and pursuant to the Federal Advisory

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Committee Act, and, in fact, several agencies have al

ready successfully engaged in negotiated rule making

3 in connection with informal rule making proceedings,

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the process has not been widely employed by other agencies, perhaps because such agencies are unfamiliar

with the process or uncertain as to their authority. This Act will establish a framework for the conduct of negotiated rule making and will encourage agencies to

use the process whenever it will enhance the informal rule making process.

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PURPOSE

SEC. 3. The purpose of this Act is to authorize agencies 13 to supplement and enhance the rule making procedures under 14 the Administrative Procedure Act, where appropriate, by es15 tablishing a negotiated rule making committee of persons 16 representing interests that will be affected by an agency rule 17 to participate in and negotiate that rule's development.

DEFINITIONS

SEC. 4. For the purpose of this Act:

(1) The term "agency" has the same meaning as

in section 551(1) of title 5, United States Code.

(2) The term "person" has the same meaning as

in section 551(2) of such title.

(3) The term "party" has the same meaning as in

section 551(3) of such title.

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