Ready for some good Democratic news? As you may have read on this board, the Bush administration is cutting the EPA's library budget by over 30 percent or $2 million, which is forcing the EPA to close libraries and lock up information that is vital to enforcing environmental laws.
On October 1, the EPA will close its headquarters library to everyone, while having no plan to offer the hundreds of thousands of unique documents and books to anyone in the near future. The Democrats have now entered the fight -- Bart Gordon (TN), Henry Waxman (CA) and John Dingell (MI) are asking the GAO to investigate.
You can read the Democrats letter to the Government Accounting Office
here. The Democrats state that "EPA professional staff assert that the proposed cuts to EPA's library system will harm the Agency's ability to carry out its mission and will be especially damaging to EPA's ability to enforce environmental laws. They also fear that, due to inadequate planning and lack of funding for digitizing documents, access to many documents will be temporarily or permanently lost."
The presidents of 16 local unions representing at least 10,000 EPA employees wrote Congress to protest the loss of EPA's technical libraries.
The EPA is not even waiting for the budget bill to pass. They have already closed regional libraries in Chicago, Dallas, and Kansas City, and now they are moving to close the headquarters library.
The Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility -- or PEER -- have been leading the fight and they report:
EPA will not say when any of this material will again become available to its staff or the public either via the internet or through inter-library loans. As the agency claims that the library closures are for budgetary reasons, it has no dedicated funds for digitizing hard copies, making microfiche available online or re-cataloguing the tens of thousands of documents that will be relocated to large storage areas called "information repositories."
"EPA is busily crating up and locking away its institutional memory," stated PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch, noting that more than 10,000 EPA scientists and other specialists are protesting the library closures as hindering their ability to do their jobs. "Despite its `Don't Worry, Be Happy' public statements, EPA has no coherent plan let alone a timetable for making these collections available."
EPA made a formal announcement of this latest library closure in a Federal Register notice published on September 20, 2006, just days before the complete shutdown takes effect. The notice is required under a federal policy (Office of Budget & Management Circular A-130) requiring that the public be notified whenever "terminating significant information dissemination products."
Curiously, EPA issued no similar public notice for its closures of its regional libraries in Chicago, Dallas and Kansas City, even though these three libraries provide services for the general public in 15 states and 109 tribal nations.
EPA's library closures (which the agency euphemistically calls "deaccessioning procedures") are sparking congressional scrutiny. On September 19th, the Ranking Members of the House Committee on Science, Energy & Commerce and Government Reform (Reps. Bart Gordon (D-TN), John Dingell (D-MI) and Henry A. Waxman (D-CA), respectively) asked the Government Accountability Office to investigate the effects that the EPA library closures will have on access to environmental information and the impacts on scientific research, regulatory quality and enforcement capability.
"EPA is taking the hard copies and microfilms and placing them in three giant information dumps, which they call `repositories,'" added Ruch, pointing to the agency promise to create three such repositories (one at its D.C. headquarters with the others in Cincinnati and Durham) to serve the entire nation. "Once these mountains of documents are moved into the repositories, what happens next is anyone's guess."
It's important to note why the GOP is doing this because as we know, it has nothing to do with the budget. According to PEER, these libraries are used by the EPA's own scientists to study the safety of chemicals, the environmental effect of new technologies, the status of Superfund hazardous waste sites, water-quality data, and the health of regional ecosystems. They also use this information to support pollution prosecutions and to track the business histories of regulated industries.
Certainly something anti-regulation, pro-business wingnuts would surely want to stop.
PEER is asking citizens to write their senators and ask them to stop these proposed cuts and instead restore the EPA libraries. Please contact your senators -- and remember that the budget could be addressed during the lame duck session after the election.