The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and General Services Administration (GSA) have awarded nearly $300 million over seven years to Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) to operate and maintain EPA’s “Central Data Exchange” (CDX). CDX is EPA's new portal for receiving and retrieving environmental reporting data from states, local government agencies, and regulated industries.

The award to CSC is one of the largest "electronic government" federal awards of its kind, according to EPA. CDX currently accepts data for certain air, water, waste and toxics programs. It will gradually be expanded to support all EPA environmental reporting by 2004, so CDX will affect ILMA members. According to EPA, CDX provides built-in quality checks, Web forms, standard file formats, and a common, "user friendly approach" to reporting data across vastly different environmental programs.CDX is part of a broader effort by the Agency and States to build a National Environmental Information Exchange Network. EPA claims that the network is being developed to integrate and streamline state and federal environmental data, and make environmental information transactions quicker, easier, more accurate, and more secure. ILMA and other business groups have repeatedly expressed concerns to EPA over the security of data provided to the Agency.Although its current focus is electronic media, EPA said that CDX will eventually incorporate a facility that also centralizes paper data collections. CDX will house the Agency's Toxics Release Data Inventory program. Some ILMA members annually submit inventory information on Form R. GSA is the federal agency responsible for managing governmental office space and procurement.

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