When the call came... Bruce James had been retired since 1993 after a full and successful career in the printing and publishing industry. He was living in a log cabin that was built in 1926 located on the bank of a beautiful river in Nevada. A good lifestyle? Yes, but still a busy one. James was serving on over a dozen boards and deeply involved in public service in the government and non-profit sectors... when the call came.

The White House believed he would be the perfect choice for the nation’s next Public Printer. His first reaction was, "No way. Why would I want to do that?" But James said the guys at the White House are good fishermen, and they fished him right out of that environment and convinced him it was a great opportunity. Bruce James was the man that the White House believed could guide the GPO out of the 19th Century and into the 21st Century.

For the record, James retains his log cabin in Lake Tahoe. Since his appointment he resigned from 13 boards but remains chair of the Board of Trustees of his alma mater, Rochester Institute of Technology and a board member of Sierra Nevada College at Lake Tahoe.

Part One Topics: (See Part One)
- Responsible for all information
- The ultimate leadership challenge
- Spending 80% of his time on the future
- Outsourcing strategies
- The OMB flack
- Best value buying
- Removing indirect costs

Part Two Topics:
- GPO’s outsourcing trends
- Reverse auctions
- Spending time with manufacturers
- What is printed in-house, overseas
- Libraries and their future
- Accessing GPO bids online

WTT: What was the dollar value last year of printing that was produced on contracts issued by the GPO to those 2,568 private sector printing companies? Do you see that dollar value growing, declining or staying flat over the next year or two, and why?

BRJ: Our spending is dropping like a rock for all the same reasons that it is in the private sector as well. People are electing not to print, to make information available digitally and to allow users to print what they need at their own computer printers. Nearly a decade ago, we bought three quarters of a billion dollars a year in printing. We spent about $430 million on outside printing last year. And I'm here to tell you that that decrease in spending certainly isn't due to the fact that the government is creating less information!