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Unnecessary Research Act of 1987

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Unnecessary Research Act of 1987
An Act to establish a Department of Unnecessary Research, to provide for the pursuit of inquiries without practical application, to transfer the functions of the Office of Marginal Inquiry, and for other purposes, insofar as there are any.
Enacted bythe 100th United States Congress
BillH.R. 1187
Introduced byRep. Thaddeus M. Pellworth (Ohio)
EnactedDecember 29, 1987
SignedNot signed
Signed byBecame law without the President's signature
StatusIn force (amended 1994, 2002, 2019)
KeywordsResearch, federal departments, unnecessity
Related legislation
  • Marginal Inquiry Act of 1961
  • Unnecessary Research Amendments of 1994
  • Temporal Adjustment Authorization Act of 2019

The Unnecessary Research Act of 1987 (H.R. 1187) is a federal statute of the United States that established the United States Department of Unnecessary Research (DUR) as a cabinet-level executive department and defined, for the first time in federal law, the conditions under which a research question may be considered unnecessary.[1] The Act transferred the functions, staff and backlog of the Office of Marginal Inquiry from the Department of Commerce to the new department, which began operations on October 1, 1988.

Introduced in February 1987 by Representative Thaddeus M. Pellworth of Ohio, the bill passed the House by 214 votes to 201 and the Senate by 51 votes to 47. It became law without the President's signature on December 29, 1987, an outcome the bill's sponsors described as "consistent with its spirit".[2] The Act's three-part test of unnecessity remains the legal basis for every programme the department has undertaken, including Project Lukewarm, the federal studies of The Ben Refrigeration Hypothesis and The Leap Minute of 2024.

Background

The Office of Marginal Inquiry (OMI) had been established in 1961 to answer constituent letters that no other federal agency would address. By 1985 it had accumulated a backlog of more than 40,000 unanswered questions and was described by the General Accounting Office as "underfunded for the volume of unnecessary work assigned to it".[3]

Pellworth, a third-term representative from a district in north-central Ohio, became interested in the OMI after his office forwarded it a constituent's question about whether cows face north while grazing. He received a reply 41 months later confirming that the question had been logged.[4] In a 1986 floor speech he argued that "if the United States is going to fail to answer questions, it should at least fail properly, with a department".[4]

Legislative history

H.R. 1187 was introduced on February 10, 1987, and referred to the House Committee on Government Operations, which held three days of hearings in May. Witnesses included the deputy director of the OMI, Mortimer K. Hallsworth, who testified that the office's existing staff of 96 would require "approximately four centuries" to clear its backlog at the current rate.[5]

The Senate companion bill was sponsored by Senator Constance Abernathy-Royce of Vermont, who secured the inclusion of Section 104, requiring the department to publish its findings "whether or not anyone wishes to read them".[1]

Legislative timeline[1]
Date Event
February 10, 1987 Introduced in the House by Rep. Pellworth
May 12–14, 1987 Hearings, House Committee on Government Operations
July 22, 1987 Reported by committee, 21–19
October 6, 1987 Passed the House, 214–201
November 30, 1987 Reported by Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs
December 15, 1987 Passed the Senate, 51–47, with amendments
December 17, 1987 House agreed to Senate amendments by voice vote
December 29, 1987 Became law without signature

The bill was presented to the President on December 17. No veto message was issued, and the bill became law at the end of the constitutional ten-day period.[lower-alpha 1][2]

Debate

Floor debate in the House centred on the cost of the new department and on whether the federal government should fund research that, by the bill's own terms, would not be useful. Opponents argued that the bill "creates a cabinet department for the express purpose of accomplishing nothing", a description Pellworth accepted as accurate.[6] Supporters contended that the existing practice of conducting unnecessary research inside other agencies, without disclosure, was the greater waste, and that the bill would "at least put it all in one place".[5]

In the Senate, an amendment offered by Senator Lyle Oberholt of Kansas to require the department to demonstrate the usefulness of its research was defeated 58 to 39, after Abernathy-Royce argued that the amendment "would abolish the department by definition".[1] A second amendment, renaming the department the "Department of Optional Research", was withdrawn after objections that the new name implied research was otherwise mandatory.

Provisions

The Act is divided into four titles.

Title I: Establishment

Title I creates the department, the office of Secretary of Unnecessary Research and the post of Inspector General. Section 101 states the department's mission: to "pursue, with full scientific rigour, those inquiries which no other agency, institution or reasonable person would undertake".[1] Section 103 requires the department to maintain a public record of all questions it has answered, which became the Federal Register of Previously Answered Questions.

Title II: The test of unnecessity

Section 201, the core of the Act, provides that the department may fund or conduct research only where each of the following conditions is met:[1]

  1. the question has no reasonably foreseeable practical application;
  2. no person, agency or industry with a material interest in the answer has requested it; and
  3. the answer, once obtained, "would not be expected to change anything".

Section 202 empowers the Inspector General to review completed research for "unauthorized necessity" and to recommend corrective action where research is found to have produced a benefit. The provision was rarely used until 2004.[7]

Title III: Transfer of functions

Title III abolishes the Office of Marginal Inquiry and transfers its staff, records and 40,213 pending questions to the new department. It also requires the department to answer each pending question "in the order received", a provision that was not fully discharged until 2009. The final question, received by the OMI in March 1962, concerned whether a dropped slice of buttered toast lands butter side down; the department's answer, published 47 years after the question was posed, was "usually".[7]

Title IV: Miscellaneous

Title IV authorises an initial appropriation of $38 million, sets out reporting requirements to Congress and contains Section 403, inserted by Senator Everett Lindqvist of Minnesota during a late-night markup session, which establishes the National Strategic Toilet Paper Reserve, and Section 404, which states that "nothing in this Act shall be construed as requiring any result". Section 405, added in the Senate, provides that the Act may be cited as the "Unnecessary Research Act of 1987" and contains no other text.[1]

Amendments

The Act has been amended three times:

  • The Unnecessary Research Amendments of 1994 authorised the National Center for Previously Answered Questions and created the Bureau of Redundant Confirmation's statutory duty to repeat completed studies.[7]
  • A 2002 amendment adjusted the Secretary's position in the presidential line of succession and added Section 206, which bars the department from studying "the necessity of the department itself", following a 2001 internal study on that subject which the department was unable to classify.[7]
  • The Temporal Adjustment Authorization Act of 2019 extended the department's authority to "non-standard modifications of civil time for research purposes", which provided the legal basis for The Leap Minute of 2024.[8]

Judicial interpretation

The test of unnecessity was considered by a federal court in Harbison Thermal Supply Co. v. Department of Unnecessary Research (1999), in which a heating contractor argued that Project Lukewarm would, if successful, have commercial value and was therefore unlawful under Section 201. The court dismissed the suit, holding that "the prospect of success is too remote to constitute a practical application".[9] A second case, Ledbetter v. Okonkwo-Hartley (2025), challenged the leap minute on the grounds that it had caused the plaintiff to be one minute late for a New Year's Eve gathering. It was dismissed for lack of standing; the judge noted that the plaintiff "would have been late in any event".[10]

Legacy

Legal commentators have described Section 201 as "the only statutory definition of pointlessness in the developed world".[9] The Act has been studied as a model by the parliaments of at least two other countries, though neither has enacted comparable legislation; a 2013 delegation from one of them concluded that their existing ministries were "already sufficient for this purpose".[7]

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ Because Congress had not adjourned sine die, the bill could not be pocket-vetoed. A White House spokesperson, asked whether the President intended to sign it, replied that "the President has a number of documents on his desk and this is one of them".

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 Unnecessary Research Act of 1987: Text and Legislative History. Washington, D.C.
    Office of Federal Imprints. p. 1. ISBN 978-0-00-000102-3. 1988. (fictional source)
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Daubney, Frances (December 30, 1987). "Research bill becomes law; nobody signs it". The Capitol Ledger. p. A1. (fictional source)
  3. ↑ Gorringe, Bernice (1991). Marginalia: The Office of Marginal Inquiry, 1961–1988. Alexandria, Virginia
    Potomac Shelf Press. p. 201. ISBN 978-0-00-000231-0. (fictional source)
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Pellworth, Thaddeus M. (1996). On the Record, Off the Point: A Congressional Memoir. Mansfield, Ohio
    Buckeye Imprint. p. 144. ISBN 978-0-00-000277-8. (fictional source)
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Hearings on H.R. 1187, the Unnecessary Research Act. Washington, D.C.
    Office of Federal Imprints. p. 37. ISBN 978-0-00-000119-1. 1987. (fictional source)
  6. ↑ Daubney, Frances (October 7, 1987). "House narrowly backs department of nothing in particular". The Capitol Ledger. p. A3. (fictional source)
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 Strake, Wendell P. (2018). Thorough About Nothing: The Department of Unnecessary Research at Thirty. Columbus, Ohio
    Lantern Hill Academic. p. 61. ISBN 978-0-00-000655-4. (fictional source)
  8. ↑ "The Leap Minute of 2024: After-Action Review". United States Department of Unnecessary Research, Office of Temporal Adjustment. April 1, 2025. Retrieved October 8, 2026. (fictional source)
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 Quenby, Martin (2001). "Unnecessity as a legal standard: Harbison and after". Potomac Law Review. 44 (2)
    301–330. doi:10.5555/plr.2001.4402. (fictional source)
  10. ↑ Mellish, Carol (June 19, 2025). "Judge tosses leap minute lawsuit". The Harrisburg Clucker-Gazette. p. A4. (fictional source)
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