One Umbrella Group Could Mean Bluer Skies for USGS

A memo sitting on the desk of Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt contains a plan that could result in serious damage to a government agency that is of vital importance to California.

According to sources who asked not to be identified, the memo calls for gutting the Western headquarters of the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, where scientists carry out research on everything from earthquakes to volcanoes to water quality. The plan, part of a cost-saving measure, calls for segments of the agency to be moved to other parts of the country. Sources said a decision could come as early as this week.

But such action would splinter an agency in which cross-fertilization among disciplines is vital to research.

Insiders say at least some of the scientists--especially those involved with earthquake research--would remain in Menlo Park. Volcano experts would be sent off to the survey’s observatory in Vancouver, Wash., and water quality people would also be moved out of state.

But if the Feds really want to help the earth sciences, they ought to be thinking in terms of consolidation, not decentralization.

Indeed, the government should consider creating an earth sciences institute that would bring all of the people who deal in those critical areas under one umbrella. This would make more sense than exiling some parts of the program so scientists would no longer be just a few steps down the hall from colleagues conducting related research.

Oddly, the plan comes at a time when the agency seems to have put most of its problems behind it. A couple of years ago, Congress actually proposed killing the USGS.

That idea was born in ignorance.

“They just had no idea what this quaint little agency was,” one source said of the members of Congress who supported eliminating it. “They thought it was created in the 1880s to map the country, and they said, ‘You’ve done that; thank you very much.’ ”

An aggressive education program on the Hill has virtually eliminated that threat, but the current proposal to move parts of the Menlo Park agency to distant centers has created a new threat.

As the system now works--or doesn’t work--scientists in various federal agencies often have to “sell” their programs to other agencies just to get the funding to carry out their research.

If a scientist, for example, can convince the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration or the Defense Department of the value of his or her research, the other agency often helps pick up the tab.

“It makes our people hucksters,” said one USGS employee. “Our guys spend half their time figuring out ways they can put together projects that will bring in money from another agency. That’s not the way it was intended, but that’s what you have to do today to survive.”

And despite the fact that President Clinton’s proposed budget calls for a $47.7-million increase for the agency (for a total of $806.9 million), there is not a lot of money available for science in the Menlo Park facility. Part of the reason is an uncomfortable predicament that the USGS helped create.

The agency is housed in several buildings that sprawl over a tree-studded “campus,” just down the road from Stanford University. A decade ago, the USGS found its buildings were in need of updating, so it agreed to turn over the facility to the General Services Administration, a federal agency that serves as the government’s landlord to other agencies, in exchange for nominal rent.

“But ever since then, the rent has just skyrocketed,” said a source at the Menlo Park office. “We now pay $32 to $34 a square foot, which is the same rent as the commercial market in Palo Alto.”

That, plus the salaries needed to keep top scientists at the facility, nearly wipes out the budget for Menlo Park.

“We don’t have a lot of money left over to do science,” the USGS employee said.

The proposal, which would send parts of the Menlo Park program to such areas as military bases near Sacramento or outside California, may not be bad in all cases. It might make sense, for example, to relocate the agency’s earthquake-monitoring system to a place where it isn’t likely to get wiped out by a temblor.

Still, there is danger of fragmenting the agency to the point that it becomes far more difficult to carry out good science.

You can see what’s coming a few years down the road. Someone will begin to wonder why people who need to be near their colleagues are so widely separated, and we will have a move underway to reconsolidate.

Let’s not wait for that. Let’s create an earth sciences institute now and put as many of these people as possible under the same roof, working for the same administrators. That way, at least they won’t have to beg, borrow and steal from other agencies to keep their research going.

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Lee Dye can be reached via e-mail at leedye@compuserve.com