COMMENTS RELATING TO THE PROPOSED CLOSURE AND TRANSFER OF NTIS FUNCTIONS FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE TO THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS by Wayne Kelley, Former Superintendent of Documents, Government Printing Office (GPO)
The National Technical Information Service (NTIS) should not be swept under the government rug without a review of the urgent need for enacting. a comprehensive Federal Information Policy.
For more than 20 years various government reports have, sounded the same warning as this from the old Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) in October 1988:
"OTA has concluded that congressional action is Urgently needed to resolve Federal information dissemination issues and to set the direction of Federal activities for years to come."
The OTA pointed out that existing laws and Federal agency programs were established by Congress before the explosive growth of electronic technology. In the year 2000, there, is no guarantee that our rapidly growing wealth of federal electronic information will be preserved or made available to the public.
The NTIS information distribution program is second in size only to the Documents Sales Service of the U. S. Government Printing Office (GPO). Both programs are required to recover costs through revenues. In recent years they have been pitted against each other in a battle for distribution of the most profitable federal documents.
The Commerce Department now proposes to dispose of NTFS in part because of increasing losses. The GPO sales program is suffering growing losses and is in danger of being dumped as well. Elimination of these two programs will create chaos and undermine our nation's unique and historic commitment of public access to government information.
Anyone who bothered to look could see this disaster coming. Many federal politicians and appointed bureaucrats believe that information dissemination programs should operate on a business model recovering expenses through revenues. On the other hand, many believe, tile government has no business being in business. It is a measure of current policy failings that some who hold these opposing views are actually the same people.
NTIS is a stunning example of these policy contradictions. In 1993, NTIS was hailed as a market-driven success by the Commerce Department and lauded in the Report of the National Performance Review. In 1999, Commerce proposes to abandon NTIS as a failure. And government reformers are silent on the virtues of selling information at market prices to better serve customers and reduce agency costs.
Here is the greatest danger. As NTIS and other long-standing dissemination programs are dismantled, there will be nothing to replace them to guarantee public access to government information. The power to distribute, withhold or restrict access to information, or to after its content, will rest solely in the hands of politicians and bureaucrats who run government operations.
Those who doubt that this power will be used need only took at the front pages of The Washington Post and New York Times for January 14, 2000. The White House has worked out a system of federal financial incentives for television networks to include anti-drug messages in plots of entertainment programs, according to the news reports. One of the many disturbing aspects of this little known arrangement was public ignorance of government involvement in program content. Viewers had no way of knowing the message they were getting was subsidized by the government.
The United States needs an up-to-date, 21st century Federal Information Policy. The government spends billions of taxpayer dollars each year to generate a broad range of scientific, technical, business, consumer, health, safety, environmental and other types of information. Citizens should have unrestricted access to this information because it has value. And because it provides an official record of government activity essential to an informed public in a democracy.
Until such a framework is in place, existing laws and safeguards should not be abandoned. It does not make sense to begin a long journey before we know the destination.