Georgia senators worry what will happen if DOGE closes key water quality office
Three weeks after the Chattahoochee Riverkeeper called on 16 Georgia delegates to try to reverse the Department of Government Efficiency’s termination of a building lease that measures water quality and quantity throughout the region, Sens. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock are raising concerns.
The two sent a letter Thursday to the leader of the U.S. Department of Interior, questioning how the government will prevent reduced water quality in Georgia and deal with other key aspects of the work done at the U.S. Geological Survey office in Norcross, which is one of several federal offices in Georgia at risk of closure after being put on DOGE’s lease cancellation list.
CRK, which raised alarm about the closure, works to keep the river water clean and safe for drinking and recreation throughout the state. Part of the group’s work is testing bacteria levels in parts of Atlanta near sewage outfalls that have led to past treatment failure discoveries.
The testing for CRK’s program, BacteriAlert, is done in the USGS office in Norcross. The savings from leaving the office would total around $1.3 million, according to the DOGE website.
This USGS office is home to the South Atlantic Water Science Center, which provides what the Chattahoochee Riverkeeper calls “critical and vital” services such as housing equipment, a designated laboratory, and a workshop storage space designed for testing services. It supports water monitoring activities in Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina.
Why Georgia senators are worried about this DOGE termination
Ossoff and Warnock said this termination is a possible threat to water quality for families across Georgia. In a letter to Department of Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, the two emphasized the science center’s importance and asked several clarifying questions.
In addition to defending the safety of drinking water, the senators pointed out that the USGS Science Center office maintains water gauges in Lake Lanier, which supplies drinking water, and at several points along the Chattahoochee River. They also said the gauges inform water flows for Georgia’s agriculture industry, nuclear reactors across the state, and Department of Defense installations. Flash flood warning notifications stem from the gauges monitored at this office, the senators said in the letter.
The DOGE website does not provide any detail about when it might be terminated, how many staff might work there, or what might happen to the staff when its terminated.
Ossoff and Warnock asked Burgum for a response by April 20 to five questions:
1. Will USGS staff from the Norcross office be relocated?
2. Have employees in USGS’s Norcross office been terminated? If so, what positions?
3. How will you ensure there is not an interruption in service to the USGS Water Science Center’s critical mission?
4. How is the Department working with the Department of Defense, local governments, and private industry to ensure a clear line of communication about water flows?
5. Did you or your staff at the Department provide any input into DOGE’s decision to terminate the lease of the USGS office in Norcross? If not, when were you notified of DOGE’s decision to terminate the office lease?
Chattahoochee Riverkeeper Policy Director Chris Manganiello said he was happy to receive the news that Ossoff and Warnock asked questions of the DOI.
“CRK is grateful for Sens. Ossoff’s and Warnock’s attention to this issue,” Mangienello said. “The work USGS staff do is critical, so clarity on the future of the Norcross office is important. At the end of the day, the USGS collects data so water managers have the best information to make the right decisions in communities all over the United States.”
Some DOGE lease terminations have been reversed, which is what the CRK wants to happen.
A nuclear repository waste site lease termination was reversed in New Mexico, a National Park Service location in Fairbanks, Alaska, was brought back to life by Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan who advocated for this park office to get off the DOGE list.
Musk acknowledged that his Department of Government Efficiency makes mistakes during an interview with Fox News.
“When we do make mistakes, we correct them quickly,” he said.
DOGE is a cost-saving initiative launched by Trump’s administration and is publicly led by Elon Musk. The goal is “to reduce the waste and fraud (in federal government) by $4 billion per day every day,” Musk said publicly for the first time in an interview on Fox News at the end of March.
