The National Technology Information Service (NTIS) will sell you
a paper copy of the federal government’s budget for a hefty
$215 fee. Or you can just find a digital copy online
for free. This is ridiculous, notes a bipartisan group of
lawmakers who want to eliminate the service. And they’re doing it
with some snark.
Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), known for his annual
Wastebook on government spending (available for only $48
by NTIS! Or free at Coburn’s own site.), issued a press release
last week saying that he and Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) are
sponsoring “a bill to eliminate an outdated agency that has
lost more than $1 million trying to sell government reports that
are available for free online.” And it’s been bleeding all this
money for about a decade.
Reiterating this sentiment, Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-Okla.) said,
“Only the Federal Government would attempt to sell what you can get
for free, make no money, then subsidize the failure.” He is one of
the sponsors for the corresponding House bill.
The NTIS may have been able to fulfill its objective of
“collect[ing] and preserv[ing] scientific, technical, engineering
and other business-related information from Federal and
international sources, and disseminates it to the American business
and industrial research community,” when the agency was founded in
1950, but it can’t compete with free services in the Internet
age.
Humorously, Coburn and company are calling it the “Let Me Google
That For You” Act. The bill highlights
some damning data:
(4) GAO found that NTIS sold only 8 percent of the 2,500,000
reports in its collection between 1995 and 2000….(A) “Of the reports added to NTIS’s repository during fiscal
years 1990 through 2011, GAO estimates that approximately 74
percent were readily available from other public sources.”.(B) “These reports were often available either from the issuing
organization’s website, the Federal Internet portal
(http://www.USA.gov) or from another source located through a web
search.”(C) “The source that most often had the report [GAO] was
searching for was another website located through
http://www.Google.com.”(D) “95 percent of the reports available from sources other than
NTIS were available free of charge.”
Apparently, NTIS has even been charging other federal agencies
for otherwise free information in order to cover its losses. The
agency does still have a few meaningful services, but not enough to
warrant a whole agency. The bill would transfer these functions to
NTIS’s parent agency, the Department of Commerce.
Although Coburn’s bill seems like a no-brainer in cutting down
on federal waste, USA Today
notes that “President Obama’s proposed 2015 budget recommends
growing the agency from $67 million to $86 million—presumably
through increased user fees.”
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