as well as making a couple of points.

1. The subscriptions they are canceling are NOT newspapers/periodicals going to an employee’s home, they are subscriptions going to the employee’s office.

2. They are canceling the subscriptions to periodicals that are available online but not to those which are not.

Lots of agencies have a concern about what appears in the press concerning that agency’s area of responsibility. For instance, every day Defense puts out the Early Bird which is a compilation of news clips dealing with DoD. The people who pull these summaries together tend to subscribe to those periodicals.

I’d also point out that the print edition of a paper, like the Washington Post, differs in many respects, especially on the Op-Ed pages, from what you see online.

Often the periodicals subscribed to are trade journals, scientific journals, etc.

The interesting thing about subscriptions is that they have to be in a name. Typically one person, usually an Admin person, will subscribe in their name for the entire office. This doesn’t mean that they get the subscription at home, only that people read magazines, rooms and offices don’t.

If your position is that the FDA or DOT should not keep up with what is happening in the industry they regulate, I’d like to hear it. If your position is that a person who is supposed to keep up with an industry as part of their job should not have their agency foot the bill for some fairly pricey publications, I’d like to hear that, too.

A government office needs certain subscriptions. I’m not talking about People or Sports Illustrated, but rather all sorts of trade publications and specialized reporters. For example my old office spent many thousands of dollar each year for a WestLaw subscription, for various reporters on legal matters relating to collective bargaining, arbitration digests from around the Country, etc. Most government offices have similar needs and the publishing companies derive most of their revenue from sales to government. There is also a who industry of “reporters” who gather and summarize all sorts of news about government, legislation, budgets, contracts and RFPs, etc. Some of these have definite political points of view.

What an administration does is make everybody submit all their subscriptions and then they are vetted by the administration. They also let the publisher know that the continued subsciption will depend entirely on how the Administration is treated. The one that have a particular bent will either be rewarded or punished for that bent.

SOP for many organizations. They are allowed so employees can stay current on industry news. I receive several company paid subscriptions that relate to my field. I see no issue with the DHS practice that had allowed this “if” those subscriptions were job related.

However, I do think the DHS is a bloated bureaucracy and would not be surprised if the paid subscriptions were abused and not job related.

I echo the comments above. Actually most Feds get most of the trade magazines for free (in hopes that they’ll buy something from one of the sponsors). Except for some pretty senior people (who are politicals anyway), the few subscriptions for physical magazines they do get are for trade publications that do not appear in web form. Personally I read them on the subway or something like that where one is not tied to one’s workstation. Then they are available for others.
What you should be asking is, out of a budget of hundreds of billions of dollars per year, this is the best the administration can do to “find and cancel programs that aren’t necessary”? $100 million out of an annual Federal budget of over a trillion (that’s 1,000,000 million). It wouldn’t be surprising if all DHS had to do to make its quota of the $100 million was to cancel a few subscriptions.
Stories like this distract you from asking the real questions.