It's like saying you don't need the U.S. Copyright Office any more because the record and movie labels do such a wonderful job making sure their content is widely available.

"Of the reports added to NTIS's repository during fiscal years 1990 through 2011, GAO estimates that approximately 74 percent were readily available from other public sources."

Yes, because proving that 26% of the material added is not readily available elsewhere proves their uselessness... Oh, and let's not forget that the mandate for them to be profitable did not exist until just before it started to become impossible for them to do so.

I'd be curious to read more about this. Looks like this isn't the first time the agency has been in the cross-hairs (from 1999) -

http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/NewsBreaks/Commerce-Departme...

So when a federal entity isn't providing enough revenue to the federal government, it can compensate for it by charging other federal entities. This seems like a very convenient way for government businesses to misreport their actual income - I'd like to see how much of the NTIS revenue actually came from the real market.

This is useful, in that it can let a support service (like, say, IT) prove its use in the regular way that businesses do (profitability). It also keeps other divisions from treating internal resources that are costly to maintain and provide as "free" - if they can find the same service outside of the organization for cheaper (i.e. in this case through Google), they have an incentive to use it.

The issue here seems to be that the NTIS is unprofitable, and it's not actually essential to the functioning of any other parts of the federal government.

tl;dr: Large organizations usually work in practice as a cluster of smaller organizations participating in a free market.

When you needed a server - that will take 3 weeks to set up. Really? It's going to take you 3 weeks to provision a new VMWare instance (cause 90% of the servers provided were VMWare instances). Really? OK. Hrm... There's a typo in the hostname - can we get that fixed? "No, that will require too much work updating our network to accommodate that."

Hrm... OK... Can we get an account for the outside contractor (me) to get on the VPN? "That may be 2 weeks - the person that does that is leaving for vacation on Thursday." Umm... It's Monday now. "There's a lot of stuff to get done before they leave."

I get that there's some benefits to having this centralized - security updates, monitoring, etc - but the impact of waiting weeks for things that should take a few minutes with any company in the real outside world is real (although hard to measure). When the entirety of the org is constrained this way, there's no comparisons to be made to make your case that it shouldn't take this long; many projects should be measured in weeks, not fiscal years.

FWIW, the times I've run in to this in the past... 15 years or so, it's usually academia. My understanding is that this is its own particular brand of IT hell.

As a developer who has to wait weeks for instances that I could spin up myself in a day or less, and instead has to wait for literal weeks, I really don't see how this cuts costs. Perhaps, as you mentioned, it makes monitoring the systems easy, but for internal instances that have no internet access, how valuable is this?

My interpretation is that they are simply providing other services and charging for those to make up lost revenue.

The problem is that federal revenue doesn't come from the real market. Unlike (most) private businesses, they don't have to earn their customers and retain them through good service. There are usually no competitors and sometimes, through law, no alternatives.

Also, they should Google the creation date of the internet. :-)

"(2) NTIS was established in 1950, more than 40 years before the creation of the Internet."

I think the internet, were it a person, would've been old enough to vote, if not drink in 1990.

Insofar as that is a critical function, the bill allows the Secretary of Commerce to declare it as such and, provided the Comptroller-General finds that the function isn't duplicated elsewhere in the federal government, transfer the function to another office within the Department of Commerce. See Section 3(b) of the bill.

It takes some real skill to find reliable, accurate, up-to-date information on the internet. Could NTIS still serve a purpose by Googling for more critical research? Or maybe the idea is that that job is for the Congressional Research Service.

Unless it inaccurately presents the content of that review, it doesn't say anything about the author of the legislation, except that they quote properly.

[1] http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc4343.html

In the mid-90's I had to travel to NIST in Virginia to repair a "pick-to-light" system for document retrieval that my company had built. All I remember is a massive basement filled with rows of pigeonhole shelves with each hole containing a document that could be removed and photocopied for the requesting agency. Considering that the library must have been continuously growing since then, getting all those documents online has to be a huge task.

[1] http://www.ntis.gov/pdf/NCC_HOPPS_IOCE_Subscriber_Discontinu...

So government documents are the inspiration for the way the Krang talk in the new TMNT cartoons...

"No Federal agency should use taxpayer dollars to purchase a report from the National Technical Information Service that is available through the Internet for free."

It doesn't say 'legally' in there any where in there.

Anyhoo....