Who needs books?
Books and science -- not exactly sacred items in Washington these days. Unions representing 10,000 Environmental Protection Agency scientists -- over half the agency's workforce -- sent a letter to Congress last Thursday protesting the Bush administration's proposed 80 percent cut in the agency's library budget. From their announcement:
In an extraordinary letter of protest, representatives for 10,000 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency scientists are asking Congress to stop the Bush administration from closing the agency’s network of technical research libraries. The EPA scientists, representing more than half of the total agency workforce, contend thousands of scientific studies are being put out of reach, hindering emergency preparedness, anti-pollution enforcement and long-term research, according to the letter released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).The move would put much research out of reach, since over 50,000 documents haven't been digitized, and there's no budget to do so. This makes the cuts short-sighted, to say the least:
In his proposed budget for FY 2007, President Bush deleted $2 million of support for EPA’s libraries, amounting to 80% of the agency’s total budget for libraries. Without waiting for Congress to act, EPA has begun shuttering libraries, closing access to collections and reassigning staff. The letter notes that “EPA library services are [now] greatly reduced or no longer available to the general public” in agency regional offices serving 19 states.
The dogged insistence by the Bush administration on a $2 million cut in an overall EPA budget of nearly $8 billion is particularly curious. EPA internal studies show that providing full library access saves an estimated 214,000 hours in professional staff time worth some $7.5 million annually, an amount far larger than the total agency library budget of $2.5 million.
1 Comments:
Sheesh ...these folks are worse than *stoopid*...EVIL in a predictable fashion.
But IMHO...this did all start in the 60's - when them *Uppity College educated kids* fomented the anti-war movement.
The Ultra-Conservative Righties have always viewed the public education system and access to information as responsible for this - and thus is the convergence of the anti- public/govenrment -education folks and convergence of the minimalist religious-ed folks born!
Cuts to public education have been ongoing ever since - and efforts to scrap the whole public-ed program in favor of faith based and privatization of schools.
Better to unlearn our Childrens of these *independent thinking tendancies.*
Bleh!
Post a Comment
Return to Facing South's main page