How do I find publications from the White House online?

Your Internet Consultant - The FAQs of Life Online

9.1. How do I find publications from the White House online?

The White House has established an Internet address for retrieving White House publications via electronic mail.

The e-mail system allows you to search White House documents for particular information and request the full texts of files that interest you. Following are the three most important commands for using the White House e-mail document server.

topic string--Will send you a list of files that contain the specified string in their title. Each file has a unique number, which becomes useful with the next command.
send file number--Will send you the specified file.
send index--Will send you the complete index of the documents available from the White House. It's pretty big, though; this file is approximately 400K.

To try this service, I sent a message with the body, topic health care, to publications@whitehouse.gov. About 20 seconds later, I received a 1,000 line message listing a ton of documents.

File-#  Name
25631
pub/political-science/US-Budget-1994-By-Section/FEDERAL-PROGRAMS-BY-
AGENCY-AND-ACCOUNT/Other-Independent-Agencies/Occupational-Safety-and-Health-/u>
Review-Commission (402 bytes)
25678
pub/political-science/US-Budget-1994-By-Section/FEDERAL-PROGRAMS-BY-
AGENCY-AND-ACCOUNT/Other-Independent-Agencies/Federal-Mine-Safety-and-Health-
Review-Commission (402 bytes)
112657
pub/political-science/US-Budget-1994-By-Section/FEDERAL-PROGRAMS-BY-
AGENCY-AND-ACCOUNT/Department-of-Veterans-Affairs/Veterans-Health-
Administration (8379 bytes)
138456
pub/political-science/US-Budget-1994-By-Section/FEDERAL-PROGRAMS-BY-
AGENCY-AND-ACCOUNT/Department-of-Labor/Occupational-Safety-and-Health-
Administration (1209 bytes)
138458
pub/political-science/US-Budget-1994-By-Section/FEDERAL-PROGRAMS-BY-
AGENCY-AND-ACCOUNT/Department-of-Labor/Mine-Safety-and-Health-Administration

(488 bytes)
158922
pub/political-science/US-Budget-1994-By-Section/FEDERAL-PROGRAMS-BY-
AGENCY-AND-ACCOUNT/Department-of-Health-and-Human-Services,-except-Social-
Security/Summary (6504 bytes)
158924
pub/political-science/US-Budget-1994-By-Section/FEDERAL-PROGRAMS-BY-
AGENCY-AND-ACCOUNT/Department-of-Health-and-Human-Services,-except-Social-
Security/Social-Security-Administration (3724 bytes)

I requested a file from the server and received the following. What a treat!

## Regarding your request:
   send file 158923

Department-of-Health-and-Human-Services,-except-Social-Security
Office-of-the-
Secretary
                               Federal funds
General and Special Funds:
  General departmental management:
      Appropriation, current         609 BA         196        90
94
      Spending authority from            BA          48        48
49
      offsetting collections
      Outlays (gross)                    O          136       243
142
                                              --------- ---------
---------
      General departmental               BA         245       139
144
      management (gross)                 O          136       243
142
                                              --------- ---------
---------
      Total, offsetting collections                 -48       -48
-49
                                              --------- ---------
---------
      Total General departmental         BA         196        90
94
      management (net)                   O           88       195
93

By the way, in case you were wondering, you can also access the White House publications via FTP from whitehouse.gov, but you can't quickly search publication titles that way, so I suggest you stick with the electronic mail server.

To receive full instructions on using this server, send this message:

To: publications@whitehouse.gov
Subject: <subject line is ignored>
Body: send info

## Regarding your request:
topic Chelsea
No matching files found.

Note: More White House information is available via FTP sunsite.unc.edu/pub/academic/political-science/white-house-papers or by gopher sunsite.unc.edu/sunsite.d/politics.d/white-house.d.

Special legislative initiatives such as health care, NAFTA, National Performance Review, and the National Information Infrastructure are on the WWW.

http://sunsite.unc.edu/unchome.html

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