Lisa M. Pinsker Sidebar Web LinksPresident Bush has proposed a heavy blow
to water programs at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) with his federal budget
for fiscal year 2003, released on Feb. 4. The budget would give the USGS $904
million, a 5 percent overall cut from last year. Almost half of that cut 
$22 million  comes out of the Surveys two major water quality programs,
the National Water Quality Assessment Program (NAWQA) and the Toxic Substances
Hydrology Program (Toxics).

The Toxics program would receive no money for the next fiscal year. Instead, the
budget calls to cut the $13.9 million program from the USGS and then transfer
$10 million to the National Science Foundation (NSF) for a competitive-grants
process for researching water quality issues. The NAWQA program will remain but
with a $5.8 million reduction, or a 9 percent decrease, bringing its budget to
$57.3 million  more than half of the total allocated funds for water research
at the USGS.

While experts on the Hill do not think Congress will look favorably on the proposed
cuts to USGS water programs, the problem remains that the government as a whole
no longer has surpluses. And the top priorities of this administration are homeland
security and the war on terrorism. Balancing those priorities and needs is proving
to be a tough chore this year.

Ironically,
a group from the Toxics program visited Sandia National Laboratories on September
11 to discuss field testing new technology out of Sandia that allows for real-time
detection of water contaminants (Geotimes, January 2002). But, despite
the natural connection between water security and homeland security, the proposed
budget gives USGS water programs no money to help prevent terrorist attacks on
the U.S. water supply. The transfer would shut down long-term research sites,
some of which have been operating for close to 20 years.
Viewed here is an outcrop of fractured rock aquifer at Mirror Lake in the Hubbard
Brook Experimental Forest in New Hampshire. USGS Toxics support for research in
the watershed originated in 1990. Recently, Toxics research related to the fate
of contaminants in bedrock environments has evolved beyond the Mirror Lake site
-- to apply the past 20 years of research there to contaminated sites. Toxics
is now developing the former Naval Air Warfare Center in West Trenton, N.J. to
investigate the movement of various contaminants. Courtesy of USGS.

The subject of water quality has been in the Surveys activity and
mission essentially since the start over 120 years ago, says Bob Hirsch,
associate director for hydrology at the USGS. Water quality programs started to
boom at the Survey in the 1980s when more people were paying attention to point
source contamination (pollution from an easily identifiable location). What
we endeavored to do early on was to say Can we develop research sites to
look generically at these kinds of problems and understand how contaminants behave?

And that, Hirsch says, was the real flagship aspect of the Toxics program, created
in 1983 to address subsurface, point source contamination, regional- and watershed-scale
contamination, and methods and tools for assessing water quality.
The program, funded by Congress, saw significant increases throughout the 1980s
with a leveling in the 1990s. What makes the Toxics program unique, says Herbert
Buxton, program coordinator, is how it provides information and tools to other
USGS programs, including NAWQA, as well as to outside agencies, including the
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Departments of Defense and Energy.
Not only do we support our other water quality activities with our methods
and tools but we also support a lot of other resource managers and regulatory
agencies, Buxton says.

The Toxics program directs 48 percent of its funding to the National Research
Program in the Hydrologic Sciences (NRP), a research group that serves all USGS
water programs and also receives funds from NAWQA. We work together to try
to develop new techniques and methods. Every program benefits from the work we
do at the National Research Program, says Mary Jo Baedecker, chief scientist
of hydrology at USGS. The presidents budget would reduce NRPs budget
24 percent, with the Toxics transfer to NSF, and shut down all research work at
Toxics sites.

Marcus Peacock, associate director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB),
says the Toxics transfer to NSF would establish a merit-based competitive review
to promote better science. John Marburger, director of the Office of Science and
Technology Policy, echoed Peacock, explaining during a media conference call that
the Toxics program was one of many science programs OMB treated the same way:
programs that supported science that was somewhat outside the agency mission,
or else similar to the kinds of programs NSF has done such a good job in managing
over the years.

Hirsch says, however, that the NSF model would not work for a program like Toxics.
NSF would go through the typical NSF-style process of putting out a broad
request for proposals and getting academic researchers to make proposals for projects
they could carry out, typically say a three-year project. That style, Hirsch
says, differs greatly from Toxics model of long-term investment in research
and development.

Toxics-sponsored
projects can run from months to years. Project length depends on what is found
and the needs of the site. Research hydrologist Allen Shapiro has been studying
how contaminants flow through fractured rock at a Toxics site in the Hubbard Brook
Experimental Forest in New Hampshire for 17 years. His work at this uncontaminated
site has allowed for the development and transfer of methods and technology for
scientists to study related problems at sites around the world.

Last years budget also called for a similar transfer to EPA. Congress didnt
go for it then. According to a source in the House Appropriations Committee, members
on the Hill wont go for it now. He says that the proposal directly conflicts
with priorities set by the Department of the Interior, such as the cooperative
restoration projects in Florida for the Everglades and in California for a program
called CALFED.

Allen Shapiro collects water samples to
analyze chlorofluorocarbon concentrations in groundwater at the Toxics site at
Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest, N.H. Water smaples are collected in flame-sealed
ampoules to avoid contact between the water sample and the atmosphere. Courtesy
of Allen Shapiro.

In both of those cases, a lot of the science for those programs comes out
of the Toxic Substances Hydrology Program, the House source says. So
why would you eliminate a program thats providing science for two of your
highest initiatives? And this tone of dismay on Capitol Hill also rings
true for the proposed cuts to NAWQA, he adds.

The NAWQA program also began in the 1980s, as congressional interest in national
water-quality assessment grew in the years following passage of the Clean Water
Act in 1972. After the NAWQA pilot program underwent rigorous review by the National
Research Council (NRC) and Congress, it won the green light from Congress in 1991.
So we essentially just now finished our first decade, Hirsch says.

NAWQA studies 42 geographic areas across the United States that represent regions
where water quality is of highest significance, particularly agricultural regions.
The program was originally designed to be 59 study areas, but our funding
hasnt kept pace with inflation, so instead of just diluting the effort and
covering all 59 areas, we prioritized the areas, says Tim Miller, program
chief.

The proposed budget cuts would bring the number of NAWQA study units down to 39.
And the statement from the presidents budget is the hope that other
agencies will come forward with money on a reimbursable basis so that the program
would not have to be decreased in size, Hirsch says. But, he adds, no agency
has stepped forward yet.

Some people may confuse NAWQAs work with that of EPA. But Hirsch says EPA
differs in its mission and approach, which is regulatory, giving grants to individual
states to monitor water quality. State to state water-quality research is valuable
but does not provide the same national infrastructure of NAWQA, he says. If
you asked every state to look at its water quality, some of them would do an excellent
job; some of them would not do an excellent job. They will do it in different
ways. They will go to different laboratories. They will use different databases.
And an ability to bring that story together, to bring that information together
to tell a story is exceedingly difficult. And that, he says, is what NAWQA
does.

In its latest review of NAWQA, released in January, NRC recommended that NAWQA
do more and not less. NRC would like to see NAWQA conduct microbial sampling and
expand its water-quality modeling efforts. Similarly, the Toxics program has recently
garnered praise for its work. The Dec. 1, 2001, issue of the American Chemical
Societys journal Environmental Science and Technology recognized
the 10 papers that have had the greatest impact on environmental sciences in the
last 35 years. USGS scientists who are part of the Toxics program authored three
of the papers.

Other
Budget Notes

In addition to the NAWQA and Toxics cuts, the president's proposed budget
would cut the National Streamflow Information Program (NSIP) by $2.1 million,
while increasing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's
budget by $4.5 million, specifically for improved flood and river forecast
services in the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic and Southeast. But the information
NOAA relies on for these services is stream gaging information from NSIP.

The budget also suggests eliminating all federal support for the State
Water Resources Institute Program. The current funding for the program
is $6 million. The proposed cuts would eliminate federal grants, which
use the federal funding along with state matching funds for the education
of future hydrologists.

The USGS Toxics program is not the only one the proposed budget slates
for a transfer to NSF. The budget would also transfer the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration's $57 million Sea Grant program and the
Environmental Protection Agency's $9 million Environmental Education program.
Early budget leaks had discussed these transfers along with a move of
three Smithsonian Institution research facilities. The Smithsonian transfer
generated the most controversy, including a masthead editorial in the
New York Times. That transfer was not included in the final budget
request.

Overall, NSF would receive a 5 percent increase in its budget. In the
geosciences, the NSF budget would increase 13.4 percent to a total of
$691.1 million. Without the three program transfers, however, the increase
in geosciences is a more modest 1.2 percent.

NSF reports that it will try to facilitate smooth transitions for existing
research projects within Toxics, Sea Grant and the Environmental Education
program.

The Office of Management and Budget is citing NSF as a model organization,
largely because it sends out nearly all of its money as grants in a peer-reviewed,
openly competitive process. "And that's proven to give good results
year after year," says John Marburger, director of the Office of
Science and Technology Policy.
Lisa M. Pinsker