Most likely cuts to these programs were included in a multi-thousand page budget bill. The Republicans elected to Congress had a choice between two budget bills, one of which spent $30 billion less. Following the will of the voters who granted them a historic electoral sweep in November, they chose to pass the smaller one. The decision to cut these particular programs was made by one of the hundreds of lobbyists, aides, and government agency employees that had a hand in writing the bill.
The congress people who voted for the cuts did not go down the list of federal programs making cost/benefit analyses to decide which programs to cut. Rather, they were presented a large package and asked to make a yes or no decision. Politics is not as rational as the rest of the entries in this discussion imply.
These information programs are tiny for now (though federal programs have a way of metastasizing) and they probably provide more benefit than cost. It is a bad policy decision to cut them, but if the alternative is making no cuts to the budget then the whole package may be worth it.
I agree that $30 billion of cuts does next to nothing to shrink the deficit. Sadly, there is little momentum behind my man Rand Paul’s proposal to cut $500 billion, or Paul Ryan’s roadmap to reduce future Social Security and Medicare deficits. The Republican leadership is playing budget theatre, passing tiny cuts that make them look good without touching the politically sensitive programs that really need shrinking. On the other hand the Democrats are playing budget denial, fighting to keep and expand every line item on the budget. Neither approach is very appealing to me. We need a plausible path to avoid national bankruptcy without raising taxes to uncompetitive levels.
And, FWIW, many individual congressional republicans may have effectively had "a choice between 2 budget bills", but one of those bills (the one we're discussing) was entirely written by Republicans. So it's not like their hands were tied here, someone made the decision to go after this.
In the long term there are a lot of potential businesses to be built off the info these sites hold. For example: 379,939 raw and geospatial datasets on data.gov -- that's like 379,939 raw ingredients begging for a recipe to be made. One recipe = one business.
Republicans love business, business, business. So somebody with some brains needs to explain to them how these sites with raw data are good for businesses and potential businesses that can create jobs and grow the economy that they love to talk about.
Unless. . . the actual reason they are getting shut down is because the 'publicans have something to hide and they're worried what that transparency can reveal.
So what's happening now is that the Republicans are pumping out legislation that slashes and burns any discretionary spending that won't blow back and piss off their constituency. So farm subsidies are ok, but Obama initiatives whose constituency consists completely of left-wing "sunlight" groups are easy pickings.
It seems bizarre, but it really isn't worth getting too excited about. Lots of legislation is born in the House, but most legislation dies in the Senate. In fact, the strategic purpose of doing this is to get you excited and frantically calling your democratic Senator about your pet project.
It appears that the Republican intent is to shut down the government, or come real close to doing so. Why they want to do this is questionable, since Bill Clinton was able to use the shutdown in his era to neutralize the republican "revolution" in the Congress in the 90s. I figure the republicans are betting that Obama's crew will bungle their response, since they seem to lack competence and cohesion.