Update on the Fulbright Senior Scholar Program
The very large Omnibus Spending Bill that passed in October included a provision calling for the United States Information Agency (USIA)—which, through its Educational and Cultural Program, has funded the Fulbright Program—to be merged into the State Department. The legislation calls for a plan, outlining specific details for the transfer, to be submitted within 60 days of the passage of the bill to appropriate congressional committees. The Fulbright Senior Scholar Program, which is over 50 years old, funds education exchange opportunities for faculty and professionals, and last year provided approximately 750 grants to U.S. citizens for research and teaching in 125 countries.
Legislation calling for this reorganization has been pending before Congress since 1995 and internal government working groups have been examining various aspects of the merger for several years. It is anticipated that the final transfer of the USIA’s functions into the State Department will occur before October 1, 1999. The State Department has indicated that the reorganization will involve minimal changes for the Educational and Cultural Program and the Fulbright Senior Scholars Program. The NCC will be monitoring the plan and its implementation.
Administration Supports Declassification
On November 3 John Podesta, the White House chief of staff, gave a speech in which he spoke of the importance of declassification and gave his assurance that the Kyl Amendment would have “only a limited and temporary impact” on the opening of records of historical significance. During Senate deliberation of the Defense Authorization Bill, Senator John Kyl (R-Ariz.) put forward an amendment that required a page-by-page review of every agency’s records over 25 years old to prevent the inadvertent disclosure of restricted data that deals with nuclear weapons designs.
Many inside and outside of government found this provision calling for a visual inspection of all agencies’ records, many of which have little likelihood of containing weapons information, as far too restrictive and as completely undermining the president’s executive order designed to increase openness. The House–Senate Conference Committee modified the Kyl Amendment to require the Department of Energy and the National Archives to develop a plan to prevent the inadvertent release of records containing restricted data during the automatic declassification of records under Executive Order 12958.
Podesta referred to the Kyl Amendment, saying, “The Congress, in an apparently well-meaning effort to further protect nuclear weapons information, included an overly broad provision that will impede the declassification of historically valuable records over 25 years old.” Podesta emphasized that core technical details about weapons of mass destruction must be protected from release; however, he also stated that “I have discussed this matter with Secretary of Energy [Bill] Richardson, and he assures me that there is full support in the department for the policies and practices contained in the executive order, and that he will be taking such steps as are necessary to assure such continued support throughout the department.” Specifically, Podesta noted that for records older than 25 years, automatic declassification processing, but not final declassification, will continue while the plan called for in the recent law is being developed.
Women’s Historic Sites Initiatives Fare Well in 105th Congress
In its final month, the 105th Congress passed several measures that support the preservation of historical sites of significance to women’s history. The president has signed into law Senator Chris Dodd’s (D-Conn.) bill, S. 2285, the Women’s Progress Commemoration Act, that will establish a commission in honor of the 150th anniversary of the Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, with the purpose of identifying sites of importance in the historic efforts to secure equal rights for women. The commission’s task is to provide the Secretary of Interior with a list of sites deserving recognition and preservation, to recommend actions to preserve those sites, and to provide interpretive and educational materials and activities at the sites. Although the bill does not provide any funds for preserving sites, it will identify them and highlight their needs.
There were three provisions dealing with women’s sites that were a part of the Interior Appropriations Bill within the Omnibus Spending Bill. Under the National Park Service’s construction line item, $550,000 was earmarked for the rehabilitation of the Susan B. Anthony House in Rochester, New York, and $100,000 was earmarked for the Women’s Rights National Historic Park budget for a women’s history trails study. This provision grew out of a bill introduced by Representative Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.) and Senators Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) and Alfonse D’Amato (R-N.Y.) to direct the Secretary of Interior to study alternatives for establishing a national historic trail to commemorate and interpret the history of women’s rights in the United States, with a special consideration of the corridor between Boston and Buffalo, as a first segment of the trail. The portion of the Interior bill that dealt with funding for the president’s millennium initiative earmarked $500,000 for the restoration of the Sewall-Belmont House Washington, D.C., the longtime headquarters of the National Woman’s Party.
National Archives Plan for Agency Storage Costs
In testimony before the House Treasury, Postal Service, and General Government Subcommittee in March, Archivist John Carlin reported on the National Archives’ new space-planning study and noted that the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) had approved an expansion of the archives’ reimbursable program, through which agencies will reimburse the archives for costs of storing and retrieving records in the archives’ federal records centers.
These 15 centers, spread across the country, provide economical storage and access to records that agencies no longer need in their offices but which must be retained for a given period of time prior to their destruction or prior to their transfer as permanent records into the National Archives. The volume of records stored in the federal records centers has grown in recent years at a rate of about 500,000 cubic feet per year, and the National Archives is unable to keep up with this expansion without initiating a new way of doing business.
The National Archives is using money in the fiscal 1999 budget to negotiate and establish reimbursable agreements with agencies, and the plan is for the reimbursable program to go into effect on October 1, 1999. Currently 30 percent of the federal records center program is funded through reimbursable payments. The archivist has noted that the federal records center program is the last major government-wide service, provided centrally, that is not funded through reimbursable payments from those receiving the services.
While the National Archives plans to retain an active role in ensuring the integrity of federal records and records management programs, the archives is also supportive of the government’s desire to create a competitive environment in which agencies may consider both private sector and other federal agencies to pro vide the services now provided by the federal records centers. However, OMB has stipulated that agencies are to continue to use the National Archives’ records centers for the next three years. Additionally OMB has specified that beginning on October 1, 1999, there will be no appropriation for the federal records center program. The centers will be operated exclusively through a revolving capital fund, from which reimbursable income will flow to support the costs of services in the program.
In implementing this program, the National Archives will be developing new regulations that will deal with many thorny and pressing issues, such as how the National Archives will monitor records that are not held at federal records centers, how billing arrangements will be handled, how costs will be determined for agencies that require minimal services and those with extensive reference and retrieval services, how electronic records will be handled, how to deal with records of federal programs that no longer exist, how agencies can revise their schedules for the lengtl1 of time for retaining temporary records in order to cut costs, and how to handle records that are currently stored for which appraisal schedules have not yet been developed. As the National Archives shifts to a new way of doing business, there are clearly many difficult questions yet to be answered.
