Tom Tancredo: “this amendment will strike language added during the committee markup that prevents the U.S. Geological Survey from…”

“this amendment will strike language added during the committee markup that prevents the U.S. Geological Survey from consolidating its older and obsolete mapping centers into a single consolidated national geospatial technical operations center. According to the agency, the consolidation is critical to the USGS's ability to lead the Nation in facilitating and leveraging geospatial information services. The centers USGS is attempting to consolidate were established many years ago to support a large field-based workforce spread out across the country when map production involved exhaustive field survey and was more manually intensive. That was fine back then, but it makes no sense now. USGS, by their own admission, no longer manually collects and plots this kind of information, nor do they print a large volume of maps. Advanced technologies like remote sensing, we have all seen Google Earth, along with consumer demand for easy access to digital products have the USGS role. The language in my amendment would strike needlessly imposing a 20th century paradigm on an agency that is desperately trying to make its way into the 21st century. This consolidation is not only saving taxpayers money, but it will create a more effective, efficient and modern USGS that is better prepared to work with partners in the State, local and private sectors.…”