The United States House Committee on the Disposition of Executive Papers is a former standing committee of the United States House of Representatives.
The committee was established on February 16, 1889, by "An Act to authorize and provide for the disposition of useless papers in the Executive Departments." The act provided that whenever an executive department accumulated files of papers that were not needed for the transaction of current business and possessed no permanent value or historical interest, the head of the agency would submit a report to Congress with a concise statement of the character and condition of such papers. The President of the United States Senate and the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives would, upon receipt of the report, each appoint two Members to sit on a joint committee to meet and examine the reports and papers, and report on them. If the report of the joint committee agreed that the papers were useless, the head of the department would be ordered to sell them as wastepaper or otherwise dispose of them.
As the disposition process became institutionalized a Select Committee on the Disposition of (Useless) Executive Papers was regularly appointed at the beginning of each Congress. In 1911 it was recognized as a standing committee in the revised Rules of the House. Under the 1934 National Archives Act the Archivist of the United States was given responsibility for governmental records and archives and was required to submit the disposition lists formerly submitted by the agencies.
In addition, the committee occasionally held hearings and reported bills relating to governmental recordkeeping and archives. Under the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1946, the two House Members on the Joint Committee on the Disposition of Executive Papers were selected from the membership of the House Administration Committee.
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“The United States must be neutral in fact as well as in name.... We must be impartial in thought as well as in action ... a nation that neither sits in judgment upon others nor is disturbed in her own counsels and which keeps herself fit and free to do what is honest and disinterested and truly serviceable for the peace of the world.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“The United States must be neutral in fact as well as in name.... We must be impartial in thought as well as in action ... a nation that neither sits in judgment upon others nor is disturbed in her own counsels and which keeps herself fit and free to do what is honest and disinterested and truly serviceable for the peace of the world.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism.”
—Thomas Nagel (b. 1938)
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—Susan Griffin (b. 1943)
“The small creatures chirp thinly through the dust, through the night.
O mother
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—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“Civility, which is a disposition to accommodate and oblige others, is essentially the same in every country; but good breeding, as it is called, which is the manner of exerting that disposition, is different in almost every country, and merely local; and every man of sense imitates and conforms to that local good breeding of the place which he is at.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“When you give power to an executive you do not know who will be filling that position when the time of crisis comes.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“Sitting along the bed’s edge, where
You curled the papers from your hair,
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
In the palms of both soiled hands.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)