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NOTEPAD

Annual Report to Congress

Fiscal Year 2025

Submitted pursuant to the NOTEPAD Transparency and Accountability Act of 1987 (fictitious)

Letter from the Director

On behalf of the NOTEPAD, I am pleased to submit this Annual Report covering Fiscal Year 2025, a year I would characterize as "broadly consistent with prior years, with some notable exceptions detailed herein."

The NOTEPAD continued its core mission of establishing standards, guidance, and public resources to ensure reliable, organized, and accessible written documentation across the United States. We expanded our margin compliance program, weathered a significant eraser shortage, and closed the books on the Great Sticky Note Incident of 2024 without, regrettably, identifying a responsible party.

Looking ahead to Fiscal Year 2026, the NOTEPAD remains committed to pencil hardness classification, legal pad freshness, and the continued operation of a stapler fleet that is, at time of writing, one unit short.

Respectfully submitted,

Director of NOTEPAD
NOTEPAD

Executive Summary

Fiscal Year 2025 saw continued growth in notebook registrations, a modest improvement in national margin compliance, and the successful resolution of the Q1 eraser emergency without recourse to a formally declared Level 2 Eraser Emergency. The NOTEPAD processed a record number of Form NP-17A submissions, though average processing time increased slightly due to a backlog described internally as "manageable."

Performance Highlights

82%

National margin compliance rate

4.2M

Pencils distributed

1.3M

Notebooks registered

14 days

Avg. sticky note incident response time

212

Stapler-related incidents reported

91 days

National eraser reserve, year-end

Organizational Structure

Office of the Director of NOTEPAD

Deputy Director, National Office for the Tracking, Evaluation, Preservation, and Archiving of Documents

Office of Graphite Standards

Office of Adhesive Note Compliance

Office of Paper Lifecycle Management

Office of Ink Policy

Office of Note Integrity

Budget Summary

Line Item	FY2025 Amount
Regional NOTEPAD Office Operations	$48,700,000
Stapler Modernization Initiative	$12,400,000
Notebook Registration System Maintenance	$3,200,000
Graphite Standards Research	$2,100,000
Public Affairs & Newsroom	$1,450,000
Emergency Eraser Reserve	$850,000
Sticky Note Dispensing Infrastructure	$610,000
Legal Pad Rotation Initiative	$95,000
Total, NOTEPAD	$69,405,000

Figures reflect obligated funds and do not include the estimated cost of staplers not yet recovered.

Goals for Fiscal Year 2026

Reduce average Form NP-17A processing time from 8–12 business millennia to 6–10 business millennia.
Finalize the Pencil Hardness Lookup Tool, first announced in 2019.
Recover the Building 4 stapler, or formally declare it lost.
Expand the National Legal Pad Rotation Initiative to include sticky pads.
Complete the second year of internal drafting on the Legal Pad Rotation Handbook.

Appendix: Glossary of Terms

Marginalia: Written or drawn material appearing in the margin of a notebook page, subject to Form NP-17A if expansion is sought.
Graphite Readiness: A household's preparedness posture with respect to pencil lead reserves, as assessed during Mechanical Pencil Preparedness Week.
Writability Confidence: An internal, not-yet-quantified measure of a legal pad's fitness for continued use.
Level 2 Eraser Emergency: A formally defined emergency status that has never been formally declared.