Senators to feds: ‘Just Google it’
Senators want to eliminate an agency tucked within the Commerce Department, suggesting that the Internet has made it obsolete.
Republican Sens. Mark Kirk (Ill.), Kelly Ayotte (N.H.), Tom Cotton (Ark.) and David Perdue (Ga.) introduced the Just Google It Act on Monday, which would eliminate the National Technical Information Service (NTIS).
{mosads}The NTIS is the “largest central resource for government-funded scientific, technical, engineering, and business related information,” according to the agency’s website. But, the senators say that the rise of internet search engines has made it “outdated and duplicative.”
“Instead of wasting millions of dollars to buy and sell printed documents, the federal government should join the 21st Century and just Google it,” Kirk said in a statement, adding that the government agency “has been obsolete since the Internet was invented.”
The senators pointed to a 2014 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report which found that a majority of documents added to the NTIS collection over the past twenty years could be found somewhere else, with most of those available for free online.
The senators would give the Commerce Department a year to shut down the NTIS and transfer any “critical functions” to another part of the department.
The senators’ proposal isn’t the first time the agency has come under congressional fire.
Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) and then-Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) introduced a similar proposal last year, the Let Me Google That For You Act.
A spokesperson for the agency told The Washington Times at the time that the reason Google and other search engines were able to find documents is “because NTIS has standardized the metadata that makes it easier to find these documents that NTIS or another federal agency has put on the web.”
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