This report responds to the requirement in Senate Report 106-76 that GAO examine an issue involving the Department of Commerce's National Technical Information Service. NTIS is a permanent repository and principal disseminator for scientific, technical, and engineering information (hereafter referred to as research). This report also responds to broader NTIS issues of concern to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation and the House Committee on Science. NTIS' World News Connection (WNC) operates an on-line foreign news service that disseminates to the public, for a fee, news obtained from the Central Intelligence Agency's Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS). The Senate Report asked us to determine whether WNC's foreign news service (1) falls within NTIS' statutory authority and (2) is detrimental to private businesses that offer similar news services. For over 55 years, NTIS (or its predecessor agency) has collected and disseminated agencies' research reports to the public. However, during the late 1990s, the agencies increasingly began making many of their research reports available to the public for free through the World Wide Web. This contributed to a decline in NTIS' revenues from the sale of these reports. This decline in sales is a serious problem for NTIS because its enabling legislation requires that to the fullest extent feasible, all of the services and functions provided by NTIS be self-sustaining. In August 1999, Secretary of Commerce Daley proposed to close NTIS by September 2000 because he believed that declining sales revenues soon would not be sufficient to recover all of NTIS' operating costs. He also proposed transferring NTIS' research report archives to the Library of Congress and requiring federal agencies to give the public free on-line access to new research reports. Commerce's draft legislation to close NTIS has not been introduced in Congress.