• The Honorable Hugh Halpern, Government Publishing Office Director

1. The GPO and Passport Creation

Chairman Bryan Steil (WI-01): I want to start off with GPO's role for 100 years in the passport operation. As we look back to a handful of years ago, there were significant delays as it relates to passports. Obviously, there's a role of the State Department and GPO - was part of that delay the result of GPO technology? Could you provide a little bit of color as to what that delay was and how some of that has already been solved in ways that GPO is analyzing a potential future increase in the demand for passports?

The Honorable Hugh Halpern: Absolutely. So it's important to remember GPO produces the blank passports that State Department then adjudicates and personalizes. During my tenure, supply has never been a real issue in backlogs. That said, the State Department keeps increasing their orders. This year it's a record 27 million. We are on track to provide that number of passports this year to the State Department. We have boosted our capabilities to deliver passports to the processing centers in a timely fashion. So, for instance, we just opened up a new distribution facility adjacent to our Pueblo distribution facility, where we can ensure that West Coast processing facilities will be within one day's delivery time for passports, much like East Coast and Southern processing centers. So we continue to work with our State Department customer to make sure that we deliver the supplies they need.

Chairman Bryan Steil (WI-01): So I'm going to bring you all the way down. You think, from the supply side of GPO, you think you can meet the demand? 

The Honorable Hugh Halpern: We believe we can, we're continuing to hire folks. 

2. How the GPO Utilizes AI

Rep. Stephanie Bice (OK-05): Your website talks about ten different use cases for AI that are being utilized, piloted or currently under review. As the Subcommittee on Modernization Chair, that's something that we are looking at. How do we, you know, properly and responsibly bring AI into the legislative discussion here and be able to utilize it? Our offices are actually adopting Microsoft Copilot to allow for speedy access to information through email or calendar review and utilizing AI. Talk a little bit about what you are doing on the AI front.

The Honorable Hugh Halpern: It's probably not a lot different than what the House is doing, on the administrative side. So for instance, we are using Copilot to help draft contract terms for our acquisitions professionals. Again, need a human being on the other side of that to make sure you're doing it right. I got a lot of lawyers who also need to make sure we're getting this right because the cost on the other side, if we don't get it right, can be big. Things like that. Using it for internal administrative stuff. I will fully tell you when it comes time for annual reviews, and I get pages and pages and pages of stuff. I'm like, 'hey, Copilot, can you can you put this into a couple of paragraphs for me to stick in the form so that we capture this?' and it does a pretty good job of that. We are also looking to use AI tools to help with our cataloging activities with the Federal Depository Library Program. We still need good, experienced librarians and catalogers to get that work done. But if we can, just like I was talking about with bills, if we can get the machine to do the more rudimentary, the sort of initial tasks and then free up our people to do the work that they need to do, that's really the best use of this technology.

3. GPO's Model Context Protocol

Rep. Mike Carey (OH-15): Chairwoman Bice and I are constantly looking to understand how other government offices are incorporating AI and machine learning systems into their daily operations. Which brings me to the GPO's Model Context Protocol or the MCP. The Model Context Protocol is an open source standard that allows connecting artificial intelligence applications to external systems. So in short, the public can use this protocol to examine the troves of data and better understand government information. Can you share a little bit more about this development and as you share that, maybe explain in layman's terms so people can understand exactly what that what as you're describing, what you're doing, what it means.

The Honorable Hugh Halpern: Sure. So the Model Context Protocol, and I will preface this with I am not an expert in constructing APIs and these similar kinds of things, but I'll do my best. The Model Context Protocol is an avenue in for these other kinds of LLMs and other kinds of AI models so that they can utilize our repository of data and use it without having to constantly train on it ahead of time. So it's a lot more efficient, particularly for a data set that changes literally every day, multiple times a day. Every time we upload a new edition of the congressional record or a new group of bills that had been introduced the day before, that data set changes. But this enables us, this enables your AI tool, whether it's Claude or Gemini or ChatGPT or whatever, it gives those tools a route into our data set so that it can effectively query that data set, find the answers it's looking for, and then present that back. Everybody was talking about, at the beginning of sort of this AI revolution, what chatbot are we going to adopt for GovInfo? And that's not the best use of our resources, because folks on the outside are going to be a lot smarter about this than we can be.