On November 19, 2006, I inquired with the GPO regarding how they decided on charging the public $8,000 for documents they produce in their normal course of printing bills. These documents are not for the end-user, but would be useful for sites like GovTrack. The U.S. Code requires most GPO documents be sold to the public at their marginal cost to distribute, and the marginal cost of distributing the documents I wanted (the “Daily Bills” product with “GPO Locator Codes”) couldn’t be more than $100 a year, and is probably closer to $1.00. Either they aren’t complying with the law, or they don’t consider the documents among those covered by that rule. I wanted to know which.
Today I got an email from GPO’s Lead Customer Service Representative:
Dear Customer: I was updating my database files and notice that your incident was still pending.
Yeah, I would say so. Better late than never.