mr. chairman , i yield myself such time as i may consume . 
beside me i have a stack of & lt ; /em & gt ; & lt ; em & gt ; congressional records . 
it used to be that the government printing office would print thousands and thousands and thousands of these because we did not use computers much . 
we did not have a searchable data base . 
these were very important and they still are , but by and large when these come around to congressional offices , they go straight to the waste basket . 
we did an informal survey in our office of the & lt ; /em & gt ; & lt ; em & gt ; congressional record . 
when the printed copy comes , we called about 20 offices or so , what do you do with them ? 
overwhelmingly , nearly all of them said it goes straight to the wastepaper basket because we have it online now , a searchable data base . 
you can search anything back to 1989 immediately the following day . 
so our legislation would simply do this : it would save $ 5.4 million annually by instructing the government printing office to print 1 , 000 per day rather than the 6 , 000 per day that they are doing now . 
we simply need to move into the 21st century . 
it used to be that we needed a lot more of them than we need today . 
we simply do not need to do that . 
this would also save about 57 tons of paper that are discarded every year , and all of the environmental damage that goes along with that . 
this is a good amendment . 
it is a commonsense amendment . 
we simply are moving away from buggy whips and other things . 
we need to recognize that we simply do not have the need any more for printed record . 
to the extent that we need them , we will still present them . 
one thousand a day is pretty generous , and we need to save money where we can . 
and we need to have credibility when we tell federal agencies to cut their budgets to live within their means . 
for us to go on printing 6 , 000 of these a day when we simply do not need them is not right . 
mr. chairman , i reserve the balance of my time . 
