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The Let Me Google That For You Act

This article is more than 9 years old.

Senator Tom Coburn has introduced the "Let Me Google That For You Act" as a way of saving some of that hard earned money that we all have to send off to run the Federal government each year. The savings aren't all that large but would be nice to have anyway. For what is currently happening is that there's a Federal agency which issues reports to people who want to see them and charges for that service. Fair enough you might think except that a very large proportion of those reports that it charges for are available for free on the internet. Which rather makes a mockery of the idea of having an agency which then charges people for providing the same reports.

All of this flags up an interesting economic problem, one that government and bureaucracy in general is uniquely subject to.

The act itself is here.

SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.

This Act may be cited as the ``Let Me Google That For You Act''.

SEC. 2. FINDINGS.

Congress finds the following:

(1) The National Technical Information Service (referred to
in this Act as ``NTIS''), the National Archives and Records
Administration, the Government Accountability Office (referred
to in this section as ``GAO''), and the Library of Congress all
collect, categorize, and distribute government information.
(2) NTIS was established in 1950, more than 40 years before
the creation of the Internet.
(3) NTIS is tasked with collecting and distributing
government-funded scientific, technical, engineering, and
business-related information and reports.
(4) GAO found that NTIS sold only 8 percent of the
2,500,000 reports in its collection between 1995 and 2000.
(5) A November 2012 GAO review of NTIS made the following
conclusions:
(A) ``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.''.
(B) ``These reports were often available either
from the issuing organization's website, the Federal
Internet portal (http://www.USA.gov) or from another
source located through a web search.''.
(C) ``The source that most often had the report
[GAO] was searching for was another website located
through http://www.Google.com.''.
(D) ``95 percent of the reports available from
sources other than NTIS were available free of
charge.''.
(6) 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.

All most fun of course. But as I say there's a larger economic problem we've got which this highlights. Which is that government, indeed bureaucracy in general, has no method to kill things off when they've outlived their usefulness. There's no automatic system that is, to kill of these by now past their sell date organisations.

Out here in the market economy we do have that automatic method: bankruptcy. When no one any longer needs the services on offer from an organisation then that organisation gets no money and goes bust. This isn't what happens in either government or bureaucracies: when a function is no longer required it has to be actively killed off, there's no automatic method by which it simply happens.

Think of this as being a little like a ship dealing with barnacles. They grow on the hull of a ship and every so often you've got to careen that ship so that you can scrape them off. A market system is a real time and automatic method of careening. Government doesn't have that so we need to get out there and prune it regularly, actively. And, to be honest, I'd be a lot more forgiving of the various people who insist that we need new offices and new staffs and new budgets to deal with new problems if those same people would also be vigilant about killing off the old parts of government that we no longer need.