the Endless Frontier." That report pointed out that there must be an independent agency which has the health and welfare of our Nation's total scientific enterprise as its sole mission and function. After that report it took 4 years of delay and legislative difficulties, but finally such an agency was created in 1950 and called the National Science Foundation.

At last, most of us thought, we have just the Government mechanism we need to supplement the efforts of the mission agencies, to formulate and insure the support of a broad and adequate national scientific

program.

What happened?

Well, the NSF has had a brilliant record. It has been a prime mainstay of our academic science effort. It has given support to many areas of science which did not come, or did not come adequately, within the purview of the mission agencies. It did put a great new effort behind the progress of graduate education in the sciences and has even contributed greatly to improving science education in the colleges and high schools. It has done much more-and yet we face today the feeling of many people that our Federal science structure is inadequate.

Why is it inadequate? Well, my own feeling is simply that the vision of Vannevar Bush and many others has never been adequately conveyed to the Congress and the people of this country. We are a practical-minded people and we see the values of scientific work when it yields immediately practical results. But we are not always foresighted people.

We are less ready to invest our money in things whose dividends may accrue only at some time in the distant future or whose practical results may not be foreseeable at all. We in America have failed to see that it is the total structure of scientific knowledge that makes new practical applications possible-not usually just a single discovery whose results were foreseen in advance. Also we have never visualized our scientific enterprise as a great humane undertaking and a great cultural endeavor-one which has lifted the minds and spirits and supported the achievements of men for hundreds of years.

For all these and other reasons the National Science Foundation has failed to receive the appropriations it has needed to fulfill its obligations and opportunities. If the NSF had grown more rapidly we would, I suspect, not be worried today about our faltering scientific enterprise. We would not be worried about the huge gaps we see in fruitful and important scientific fields.

Let me give some concrete examples.

The Congress and many American people have been concerned in recent years that we are giving inadequate attention to the many areas of marine science. Many mission agencies of Government are indeed interested and concerned with the oceans, our coastal waters and estuaries, including the vast and mysterious motions of the seas which play an important role in our weather, and including the nature, preservation and enhancement of the seas' great resources of living things. The mission agencies today spend nearly $500 million a year on the applied science and technology of the oceans. But if some areas of marine science are still neglected, it might be desirable to seek an increased budget for the National Science Foundation to supplement its already excellent program in this area.

We are concerned in this country, too, about the atmospheric sciences, about the weather and the possibilities of modifying it. Several agencies of Government are involved also in this enterprise, with a coordinating mechanism available in the Interagency Committee on Atmospheric Sciences of the Federal Council for Science and Technology.

That committee has seen the gaps in our programs. With adequate funding of its budgets the NSF could supplement the excellent but inadequate program which it has already initiated in the atmospheric science field.

Our current interests in this country and in the Congress are focusing on the problems of the quality of our environment. The President has created a new Cabinet-level Council on Environmental Quality to coordinate Federal efforts in this field, and several bills are before the House and Senate aimed to enhance the Federal efforts.

Many universities wish that there were better opportunities to initiate or expand research and training efforts in environmental problems-problems which involve not only science and technology but also social and behavioral science, economics, and political science.

Again, several Federal agencies have responsibilities and activities in this field--but again, there are serious gaps. An adequately supported NSF budget could support new research and educational efforts and institutes in this field-with vast benefit to the country. For this is an area in which we badly need new fundamental knowledge and many trained people.

I could go into other fields and other problems which are of importance to our national welfare and are important to strengthening the structure of science and opening up new potentialities for application. But my point is simple: We have already created an agency quite competent to carry out and fulfill these functions. We need only to use it more adequately and more wisely.

But let me turn to some of the specific suggestions which have been made for improving our Federal structure for science. These, I think, fall into two main categories: Those which propose a new Department of Science or Department of Science and Technology-at Cabinet level-and those suggestions which propose the consolidation of certain existing activities into a new independent or sub-Cabinet agency or institute. In all proposals that I have seen, the National Science Foundation becomes an essential part of the new agency.

The advantage claimed for the Department of Science and Technology-I will call it the Department of Science for brevity-is that it places a scientist at the Cabinet table. Though this sounds like an attractive feature, there are two drawbacks. In the first place, Cabinet members are politically appointed and are replaced with each new administration. And this is an essential feature of our form of government.

But the pursuit of science is not a political matter, and the head of an important science agency, plus, inevitably, his key staff people, should not change with each administration. The term, for example, of the Director of the National Science Foundation was purposely set at 6 years to avoid precisely this situation of changing in each administration.

This, I believe, was a wise move and an advantage which we should not relínquish in any structural change. In the second place, referring to the Department of Science, science is not a departmental matter but should, and does, pervade the whole Government. A Department of Science would tend to bring more and more scientific activities into its own purview, whereas the policy of the Government should be to spread them into the many agencies where science and technology are basic to the agency mission.

Finally, I should point out that the Science Adviser now normally sits with the Cabinet, representing not a single department or a single vested interest, but representing the President. His task is to urge and help all agencies increase their activities and their effectiveness in scientific and technological endeavors and not to bring these endeavors under his own supervision.

Thus science is already represented at the White House, and therefore at the Cabinet level. Also, the Science Adviser can advise the President as to the total national needs in science rather than the particular needs of a single department.

Let me turn to the other alternative of combining the Science Foundation with activities now housed in other agencies to form a new independent agency or institutes of advanced research and study as suggested in this committee's report. This arrangement would result, in the first place, in a lowering of the stature of the Foundation and its Director.

The NSF Director now reports directly to the President, and under any of the new arrangements proposed he would report to another officer who in turn would report to the President. In view of what I have previously said, you can understand why I would not consider this an elevation or strengthening of our most important general science agency, the NSF.

Another aspect of such an agency or institute arrangement is that it combines two different kinds of functions: First, the support of science, largely in universities and research institutes; and second, the operation of scientific and/or engineering laboratories or enterprises.

I think experience has shown that when an agency has both operating and supporting functions, its operations must of necessity take precedence over its supporting activities. The chairman mentioned the problem of NASA with its budgetary tightness. It must support its own laboratories, and therefore its university support has to decline. NASA, AEC, Department of Defense, and other agencies which carry on both operations and support naturally give precedence to their own operating responsibilities. The needs of a university for more funding of science can hardly take priority over the needs of an important Government laboratory for which an agency is fully and solely responsible.

I pay tribute to Department of Defense and other agencies which have maintained academic support in spite of many pressures. But usually, and particularly in these days, it is a losing battle. Since the universities of the Nation are the fountainhead of new knowledge in science as in other fields, their support is a critical element of the national science picture. This function should not be subservient to

the operating function of any agency, but should be the sole function of an independent agency.

Thus, if I were trying to consider a new operating agency of Gov. ernment to direct the management of applied science and technological laboratories, I would leave the National Science Foundation out of such an agency and let it remain the independent and prime agency for university science support.

This leads me to raise the question as to whether

Mr. DADDARIO. If I might interrupt right there.

Dr. DUBRIDGE. Yes.

Mr. DADDARIO. If you were to leave the National Science Foundation out of such an agency and let it remain the prime agency for university science support, wouldn't you necessarily have to give it power that it doesn't presently have, such as power to initiate or veto plans in other agencies where science activity is going on? Could it serve as the important agency in science unless it had authority which it presently does not have?

Dr. DUBRIDGE. Well, I don't believe that authority, in that sense, is what it needs. What it needs is leverage, prestige, the ability to secure adequate funding from the Congress.

The authority it should have, it seems to me, is an authority to fill in the gaps which exist in our total science picture, because of the variety of interests and activities of the other agencies. And through various mechanisms, the Science Foundation people are aware of the scientific activities going on throughout all the other agencies of Government.

They are able to spot the national needs and where they are lacking, and if they had the funding, and the flexible funding, they could step in and say we are not getting all we need in the field of marine science or atmospheric science or environmental science or health science, or any other fields of science and therefore they would attempt to fill in the scientific gaps where they appear.

So it can be a balance wheel as has been often said, if it had sufficient monetary muscle. It would provide the coordination simply by being in there, finding out where the gaps are and filling them in.

Mr. DADDARIO. But Dr. DuBridge when you add sufficient funding, you overcome a lot of problems, because in all things, when there is plenty of money the inefficiencies are submerged. When you have good times in the country, the inefficient businesses survive. When the squeeze comes, the ones which are badly managed, are hurt.

Unless the National Science Foundation does have some leverage in these areas, knowing what is going on would not appear to me to be sufficient. If we consider some of the problems which the National Science Foundation has had to face particularly in this day, to use some of your own words, when it knows what is going on in other agencies and when it finds itself having to make some choices because of the restricted funding and when it takes upon itself work going on in other agencies without money being added to give support or there is a diminishing amount in the budget of those agencies which transfer activities to the National Science Foundation.

This is really management, isn't it? Isn't this administration of our resources?

Dr. DUBRIDGE. Yes.

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Mr. DADDARIO. When there is a budget squeeze, if such things as this come about, we aren't really talking about support of science or support of technology. We are talking about its administration and its management which goes beyond just supporting scientists, because there is such a dislocation of activity and such concern that permeates the whole academic establishment.

The effect that this has on graduate students, the effect that it has on proper growth-it appears to me if that is all we would do for the National Science Foundation, it sort of leaves it out in limbo by itself without leverage powers. Perhaps we would make the situation worse rather than better.

Dr. DUBRIDGE. Well, I certainly agree with you that we have not given the Science Foundation the support to do the things that I have visualized that it should be doing. The question is how to strengthen the Science Foundation so it can do these things more adequately?

It is my feeling that you do not strengthen the Foundation itself by associating it with other agencies with very different missions and kinds of responsibilities. If you put the Science Foundation as one segment of a new agency, of whatever kind it is, and the other segments had to do with applied science-for example, with the management of certain laboratories working in this or that applied science field-it is my feeling that the Science Foundation might be in a weaker and not in a stronger position, because its attitude toward supporting university science would often be put in the shadow by the immediate, current and the practically aimed needs of these other laboratories and segments of this new agency which are associated

with it.

So the only question is, Is the Science Foundation better by being independent or better by being associated but somewhat unreleated? Mr. DADDARIO. You make a good case for having it remain, under these sets of circumstances, independent rather than under some other agency. But my questioning is that enough if the management structure were to be set up so that it were to be separate and apart? Wouldn't it need some additional authority?

Dr. DUBRIDGE. Well, I think the amendments of the National Science Foundation Act which you sponsored recognize the fact that although the original National Science Foundation Act did charge the Foundation with certain matters of coordinating, evaluating, and supervising the work of other agencies, this became an infeasible task for the Foundation.

No department or agency can supervise, coordinate, evaluate the work of other agencies who are on the same level and who are competing and have other points of view and other interests.

Mr. DADDARIO. Especially when those other agencies are doing the work that was originally contemplated to have been done within the National Science Foundation, much of this work is finding its way there during this 4-year hiatus which you refer to in the formation of the National Science Foundation.

Dr. DUBRIDGE. That is true. Therefore, I don't think any agency, whether it is Cabinet level or sub-Cabinet level, can have authority to direct or even very strongly, except through persuasion and discussion, influence the work of other agencies.