NCH WASHINGTON UPDATE (Vol. 12, #3; 20 JANUARY 2006) by Bruce Craig
2. NIXON LIBRARY AGREES TO DEED OF GIFT FOR NIXON POLITICAL MATERIALS
3. SUNSHINE WEEK EVENTS ANNOUNCED
4. HISTORIAN LOUIS GALAMBOS APPOINTED TO KLUGE CHAIR
5. BITS AND BYTES: Copyright Roundtables Scheduled; Unpublished Congressional Hearings Tally Available
6. ARTICLES OF INTEREST: "America By the Numbers" (Washington Post)
1. THE PRESIDENT'S BUDGET -- WHAT TO EXPECT Early next month President Bush will advance to Congress a proposed budget for operations of the federal government for FY 2007. Though agency officials are generally keeping silent (as they are expected to until the budget is officially released), agency and Hill insiders have been spreading the news of what to expect. Specific numbers are hard to nail down, but what we are hearing isn't good.
Recently, Treasury Secretary John W. Snow officially announced that his goal is to make the President look good on his 2004 campaign vow to cut the budget deficit in half by 2009. With a budget deficit of $319 billion in 2005, Snow's Treasury, the Office of Management and Budget, and the White House are all looking for ways to cut the projected deficit by upward of $160 billion. The situation is worse than that as economists are forecasting a deficit in 2006 of $400 billion, so the White House may be looking for $200 billion!
Some believe it is virtually impossible to keep the federal government running with a budget that makes such deep cuts. Nevertheless, agency heads, when they make their annual visits to OMB examiners, are being asked to do their part in reducing growth in government spending. Some were sent back to make adjustments to their initial submissions to the White House. Many agencies will be lucky to see their budgets come in at last year's authorized levels; most domestic agencies can expect massive reductions and zeroing out of specific programs deemed "non-essential."
Bottom line, what the president is expected to offer in his budget is an across-the-board "call for sacrifices." Congress of course can and probably will ignore the President's budget as they have in recent years. Time will tell.
One last item...the debt ceiling is once again about to be exceeded. Undoubtedly the White House will try to downplay that which Secretary Snow will need to do in mid-February -- request that Congress push up the current debt limit above the $8.184 trillion level.
2. NIXON LIBRARY AGREES TO DEED OF GIFT FOR NIXON POLITICAL MATERIALS The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has released a copy of the draft deed of gift agreement that will be entered into by NARA and the Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace Foundation once the private library is absorbed into the presidential library system. That donation is expected to take place later this year. According to NARA officials, "The Nixon Foundation has agreed to the terms [of the agreement] and will sign the deed at the time of transfer of the Nixon Library to the National Archives." Sharon Fawcett, Assistant Archivist for Presidential Libraries states that the Nixon foundation accepted the NARA draft "without revision."
Under the terms of the deed, the Nixon foundation will "donate and convey" to the federal government "the portions of tapes and textual materials that are determined to constitute private returnable information concerning political activities in accordance with the terms of the Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act (PRMPA)." NARA will review Nixon political materials in the Nixon tapes and historical materials held by NARA at its College Park repository as part of the package for transfer. The deed states that NARA will review the "political materials" using "the same standards that NARA used in reviewing the constitutional and statutory conversations on the Nixon records and other so called "c and s" materials from the Nixon presidency." It is worth noting that the deed of gift in no way affects the portions of tapes and textual materials that have been or will be determined to constitute information of a purely personal nature to President Nixon or his family.
Among the items to be transferred are conversations in the Nixon White House tapes, textual and other audio-visual materials still in NARA's custody, and such materials returned by NARA to the Nixon estate that are currently located at the Yorba Linda library. Furthermore, according to the agreement, "It is the Donors wish that the Political/Returnable Materials be made available for research as soon as possible and to the fullest extent possible, in accordance with NARA's review standards."
A copy of the agreement will soon be posted on the American Historical Association webpage at: http://www.historians.org .
3. SUNSHINE WEEK EVENTS ANNOUNCED
Each year a number of government openness organizations, including the American Library Association, American Society of Newspaper Editors, and OpenTheGovernment.org, celebrate "Sunshine Week," an annual event begun last year that seeks to raise awareness of the importance of open government. This year events will take place of 12-18 March 2006. Programs will focuses around the theme: "Are We Safer in the Dark? A National Dialogue on Open Government and Secrecy."
A panel discussion will serve as the kick-off event in Washington, DC and then link via satellite to locally hosted discussions in communities across the country. The hope is that this panel of experts from around the country will have a lively discussion about open government and secrecy, the problems Americans are facing with it, how it impacts communities, and what the public can do about it.
The opening event will be Monday, 13 March 2006 from 1:00pm - 2:30pm ET with local programs following. [note: local times will vary.]
Regularly updated information can be found at <http://www.openthegovernment.org/article/subarchive/85> , including a listing of groups sponsoring local programs. Online registration is now available at <http://tinyurl.com/c57xr> and will continue through 6 March 2006.
4. HISTORIAN LOUIS GALAMBOS APPOINTED TO KLUGE CHAIR Librarian of Congress James H. Billington has appointed Louis Galambos to the Cary and Ann Maguire Chair in American History and Ethics at the John W. Kluge Center, effective 1 January 2006. Galambos, a professor of history at the Johns Hopkins University, is the fourth recipient of the honor.
The holder of the Maguire Chair conducts research on ethical issues associated with American history. Research may include the conduct of politics and government at all levels of American life as well as the role of religion, business, urban affairs, law, science, and medicine in the ethical dimensions of leadership.
Galambos was editor of the 21-volume publication "The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower from 1971 to 1995," and co-editor with Daun van Ee, a curator in the Manuscript Division at the Library of Congress, from 1995 to 2001. The last of the 21 volumes was completed in 2001, with the publication of a four-volume set titled "The Presidency: Keeping the Peace."
Galambos also has taught at Rice, Rutgers, and Yale universities, and he has served as president of the Business History Conference and the Economic History Association. A former editor of The Journal of Economic History, Galambos has written extensively on U.S. business history, on business-government relations, on the economic aspects of modern institutional development in America and on the rise of the bureaucratic state.
Galambos, who received his Ph.D. from Yale, was a senior fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities and a business history fellow at Harvard University's Graduate School of Business Administration. In addition, he has held fellowships at the Woodrow Wilson Center and at Princeton University.
Through a generous endowment from John W. Kluge, the Library of Congress established the Kluge Center in 2000 to bring together the world's best thinkers to stimulate, energize, and distill wisdom form the Library's rich resources and to interact with policymakers in Washington.
For further information on the Kluge Center, visit www.loc.gov/kluge.
5. BITS AND BYTES
Item #1 -- Copyright Roundtables Scheduled: A committee appointed by the Library of Congress will hold two public roundtables in March 2006 in Los Angeles and in Washington, D.C. to gather insights and opinions on how to revise copyright exceptions for libraries and archives (Section 108 of the Copyright Act). The committee consists of independent experts from the commercial and not-for-profit sectors. The roundtables, which are free and open to the public, will be held Wednesday, 8 March in Los Angeles and on Thursday, 16 March in Washington, D.C. The committee is charged to re- examine the exceptions and limitations applicable to libraries and archives under the Copyright Act, specifically in light of the changes produced by the widespread use of digital technologies since the last significant study in 1988. Specifically, the group is studying how Section 108 of the Copyright Act (titled Limitations on Exclusive Rights: Reproduction by Libraries and Archives) may need to be amended to address the relevant issues and concerns of libraries and archives, as well as creators and other copyright holders. Information on how to participate in the roundtables will be published in the Federal Register later this month and made available on the Section 108 Study Group Web site: www.loc.gov/section108 where additional information is available about the roundtable and the scheduled meetings.
Item #2 -- Unpublished Congressional Hearings Tally Available: Almost every day that Congress is in session, multiple committees hold hearings. But not every hearing, not even every important hearing, finds it way into print. The U.S. Congressional Bibliographies project at North Carolina State University has tallied the numbers of hearings held by each Senate committee from 1993-2001, and reported the percentage of hearings that have been published by the Government Printing Office. According to the tally, only 38% of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings in 2001, many of which involved confirmation hearings of Bush appointees, have been published. Unpublished hearings also addressed topics such as anthrax exposure (Appropriations), aviation competition (Commerce), "club" drugs (Narcotics), E-911 compliance (Commerce), Internet privacy (Commerce), unsolicited commercial e-mail (Commerce), and veterans programs (VA), observed NCSU Social Science Reference Librarian John A. McGeachy. For the statistical reports of printed hearings visit: http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/congbibs/senate/ .
6. ARTICLES OF INTEREST
One posting this week: In Op-Ed writer Robert J. Samuelson's "America By the Numbers" (Washington Post; 18 January 2006) the author praises and summarizes the newest edition of Cambridge University Press's "Historical Statistics of the United States" -- a five volume set costing $825 that contains fascinating and illuminating numbers of interest to historians. For the article tap into: http://www.washingtonpost.com (if the link is no longer valid, in the Post Search box that pops up after the ink fails, type the authors name and hit return; the article will appear).