In June, the presidents of 17 locals of the American Federation of Federal Employees, representing 10,000 EPA scientists, signed a letter protesting a $2-million cut in EPA operations and administration. On August 16, the American Federation of Government Employees filed a formal grievance on behalf of EPA scientists, demanding that further action be delayed until affected scientists can negotiate.
On August 21, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) disseminated an August 15 document titled “EPA FY 2007 Library Plan” that indicated the agency would act immediately on the administration’s proposed cuts without waiting on action from Congress. In addition to shutting down three libraries, the plan would gradually reduce the hours and services of the seven other regional libraries. “So far the Seattle library will continue but with a cut in staff,” Bernadine Abbott Hoduski, founder of ALA’s Government Documents Round Table, told American Libraries. “San Francisco will stay open with half-staff. All contracts for running these regional libraries terminate as of October 1.”
In an August 22 letter to the California-Nevada community website YubaNet.com, EPA deputy administrator Marcus Peacock wrote, “The EPA is providing comprehensive access to agency documents and materials through EPA’s public website. Retrieving materials will not only be more efficient but also [they will be] easier to locate by using the agency’s online collection and reference services. . . . To date, more than 15,000 EPA documents are already available through the EPA’s public website.” An anonymous EPA employee submitted a rebuttal to YubaNet a week later, stating, “Yes, 15,000 EPA documents have already been digitized. But what about the additional 40,000–50,000 that can only be found in hard copy?”
“The basis for this estimate is rooted in the fact that virtually nothing which EPA produced prior to 1990 is digitized,” PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch told AL. Ruch said in a press release, “The central fiction is EPA’s promise to digitize its entire massive collection, making everything available online someday, without any dedicated funds amid sharply reduced budgets.”
On September 13, PEER cited a June 8 internal EPA memo that calls for a five-year fiscal reduction package aimed toward “larger savings.” The memo suggests a 10% closure of EPA’s network of laboratories—a cut that would increase to 20% by 2011—and gives EPA regions a greater hand in reducing personnel. PEER also reports that another recent internal EPA memo presents a plan to reduce the regional libraries down to four “Eco-Regions.”
Posted September 15, 2006; modified September 18, 2006.