Bureau Of Mines Buried Like Underground Cave-In -- After 85 Years, Agency Gets 90 Days To Shut Down

WASHINGTON - When the budget walls collapsed around the Bureau of Mines, they did so with the grim finality of an underground cave-in. The Interior Department agency was given 90 days to shut down.

The last paychecks will be handed out Jan. 8, when 1,200 employees hit the streets in the largest of the government's announced layoffs.

"It's pretty appalling," said Rhea Graham, the bureau's director, who thinks her mandate to dismantle a statutory agency in 90 days "is an absolutely impossible time frame" and "is setting a very bad precedent for the government."

The swift demise of the Bureau of Mines reflects the chaos and political pressures of this year's budgetary wars, which last month led to an unprecedented weeklong shutdown of the government. The decision to do away with the bureau also shows how vulnerable agencies can be, even those that believe they have earned a secure niche.

Longtime congressional supporters from West Virginia, Pennsylvania and the West - Democratic and Republican - could not maneuver to save the bureau when House Republicans moved to ax it. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt fell short, having to choose which programs to protect and which to sacrifice.

Founded in 1910 after a series of mine disasters that killed hundreds of workers, the bureau has operated in recent years as a scientific-research agency. Its work has focused on health and safety problems that threaten mine workers and on creating

innovative solutions to pollution caused by abandoned uranium and coal mines.

The fast-paced closure, however, has disrupted the agency's sense of the orderly. Graham has spent the past few weeks trying to organize the last days, transfer to other agencies programs that Congress and the administration agreed to salvage, and track spending to ensure that workers can collect severance pay.

The bureau's employees express a range of emotions, from anger to an almost passive resignation. "We're a bunch of 45-year-olds who don't have enough for retirement," said one official.

Most of the employees - scientists, geologists, engineers, economists, minerals specialists and industrial analysts - will be looking for work while the private sector is spending less on research and development. "The job hunt is going to be longer for these professional people, and they will probably fall back in their salary," said Lewis Wade, director of the bureau's Twin Cities Research Center, which will be closing.

Graham, who received a bachelor's degree in geology at Bryn Mawr College in 1974, became the bureau's 19th director in October 1994. A sizable number of bureau employees, she said, are concerned that the government no longer sees a need to invest in engineers and scientists.

The bureau's troubles began in June, when the Appropriations Interior subcommittee headed by Rep. Ralph Regula, R-Ohio, called for its "orderly termination." The panel pointed out that the administration had initially proposed $152 million in fiscal 1996 funding, but cut that by $20 million in its final budget request. That cut, and indications the administration was planning more, "revealed a lack of commitment," the subcommittee said.

Like other Appropriations panels, the subcommittee had been told by House Appropriations Committee Chairman Bob Livingston, R-La., to find agencies to eliminate as a way to obtain long-term savings, House GOP aides said. The Bureau of Mines became a target, one aide said, because its work "has been slowly siphoned off by other agencies."