The Environmental Protection Agency is right to want to make its research and reports available online. That work should be completed, however, before the agency closes its libraries and puts many of its documents into storage where they will be hard to access. The agency has the process backwards and should heed lawmakers’ requests to halt the library cutbacks until it develops a plan that passes congressional scrutiny for ensuring its own scientists and the public have access to its information.

The agency has already closed the library at its headquarters in Washington, D.C., and the contents of a specialized library on the health effects of pesticides and toxic chemicals were boxed up and sent away for storage. Three regional libraries, serving 15 states, were closed, and the hours at four others were cut back.

The libraries were used by EPA staffers for work as simple as locating chemical facilities to complex research on the health effects of pesticides to write federal standards for their use. A 2004 study by the agency found that EPA librarians saved millions of dollars per year because they were better able to research and locate information than the rest of the agency’s staff. The libraries were also used by the state, local and tribal agencies, private companies.

EPA officials say the library cutbacks are necessary to save money and that all the documents in the closed libraries will be online by January. This is hard to believe when Congress has yet to appropriate money for that purpose.

The Government Accountability Office is currently doing a review of the EPA library system and the agency’s plans to shrink them. This review should be completed and reviewed before Congress or the agency makes any further decisions.

Members of Congress, along with the Congressional Research Service, have noted that although the agency says it is doing the work to meet budget constraints imposed by the White House’s 2007 budget, Congress has not acted on that budget in general, or the library closure provision specifically. That’s why the agency should maintain the status quo until Congress can look into the matter.

Sen. Susan Collins, chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, has expressed the same concerns to EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson and asked that any document destruction be halted. Rep. Tom Allen has expressed the same sentiments to members of the House Appropriations Committee.

The EPA’s handling of its libraries furthers the perception that the agency is hostile to public scrutiny and goes out of its way to hide controversial information. This probably isn’t the reason for the library cutbacks, but in the absence of a plan to ensure that access to information, which was paid for with taxpayer dollars, is not curtailed, the public is left to assume the worst.

This is not in the agency’s or the public’s interest.