Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

21. Department of Commerce · Notable

Move NTIS functions to NIST

Not started

687 21. Department of Commerce

“NTIS operates through user fees but is largely obsolete due to modern usage of the internet by federal agencies and researchers. NTIS’s functions should be moved to NIST and consolidated with the Tech Transfer and ROI initiatives.”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    Nothing found. The National Technical Information Service still exists as its own Commerce bureau and files its own information collections — the Limited Access Death Master File Certification Program clearances of 2026-01-30 and 2026-03-27 are filed under NTIS's own agency name. No transfer of its functions to NIST was proposed, ordered or enacted, and NIST and NTIS still solicit members for their advisory committees jointly rather than as one body.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

Negative search: Federal Register full text since 2025-01-20 for "National Technical Information Service" (8 documents, each opened — two of them NTIS’s own collections, one the joint NIST/NTIS advisory-committee nomination notice of 2025-04-18, the rest other agencies citing NTIS as a document source); jq over bills.ndjson for Technical Information Service (0) and over public-laws.ndjson (0); a grep of the text-extracted FY2026 and FY2027 Budget documents for Technical Information Service (0 hits — neither budget proposes anything for NTIS); and presidential-actions.ndjson for Technical Information.

The 2026-07-20 nomination notice is worth noting for what it no longer says: it solicits members for “National Institute of Standards and Technology Federal Advisory Committees”, where the 2025-04-18 notice said “National Institute of Standards and Technology and National Technical Information Service Federal Advisory Committees”. That is a change in an advisory-committee notice, not evidence that the bureau’s functions moved, and §3b’s rename rule is explicit that an org-chart signal is not a substitute for what happened to the functions. Recorded as an observation only.

Action
transfer
Object
National Technical Information Service
ID
1912