agement services, and general services. Upon assuming office in January and in the short time which has intervened since, the Secretary has found urgent need for additional assistance in several areas. The first of these is in the immediate Office of the Secretary where request is made for $55,000 to cover salaries and supporting expenses of four additional positions. Two of the positions are an assistant to the Secretary for research with a secretary and the other two are a special assistant for congressional liaison with a secretary. The Secretary is responsible for a number of programs in the various bureaus of the Department that involve significant scientific research, including the fields of minerals and fuels, fish and wildlife, and water development. In order that the Secretary may carry out his responsibilities for the many programs involving research, it is necessary that he have a staff assistant who is eminently qualified in the administration and development of complex research programs. The positions for congressional liaison are to provide assistance to the Secretary on matters involving relations with Members of Congress. The other area where additional assistance is required is that of planning for the natural resource programs. The Department has had a small staff in the past known as the Technical Review Staff to handle day-to-day problems, but the present staff is entirely inadequate for the current needs. The purpose of the staff is to advise and assist the Secretary in the development of longrange natural resource programs, the coordination of programs within the Department and with other Government agencies, and to provide staff assistance on the daily problems in resource programs. These needs can best be met by a program staff of professional employees who can spend full time on matters essential to the conservation and development of our national resources. The request is for $270,000 to provide 24 additional positions of which 6 would be in the field. The House allowance is for 16 of these but it is believed that the full amount requested is required if the job is to be performed in an adequate manner. Restoration of $98,000 for this purpose is respectfully requested. The remaining $3,000 of the restoration is requested to cover the additional cost of the pay increase granted by the Federal Employees Salary Increase Act of 1960 over that required for the current year. The increase was effective for only 251⁄2 pay periods in 1961 and the $3,000 is required to cover the cost for the one-half pay period not already provided for. FUNDS FOR PAY COST Mr. BEASLEY. As you explained, the estimate for 1962 is the same as the appropriation for 1961 except that we are asking for the additional funds needed to meet the pay act cost, and an increase of $325,000, of which $55,000 is to provide the Secretary with a research administrator and a congressional liaison representative. INCREASE IN STAFF There is also an increase for what is now the Technical Review Staff. If you will recall, when the Secretary appeared before the committee, he explained that he was thinking of a program planning group to assist him in planning the important activities of the Department over the period of years. Inasmuch as the Secretary explained all of these items himself when he was before the committee, I will not make any further statement regarding the item except to explain that I have with me this morning Mr. Charles Stoddard, who is the Director of the Technical Review Staff, and if you wish to have any additional information regarding the importance of the restoration of the House reduction which was applied to the Technical Review Staff, I will be very happy for Mr. Stoddard to respond to any questions. Chairman HAYDEN. We will be glad to hear from you, Mr. Stoddard. STATEMENT OF CHARLES STODDARD Mr. STODDARD. I thought, Mr. Chairman, that I might mention some of the trends of responsibilities which are being developed and asked of this staff to give you a background of what is involved. Chairman HAYDEN. It is something new, in other words. You are trying to have better coordination. Mr. STODDARD. Yes. Actually, the history of the staff goes back to the late forties when Secretary Krug developed the thought that the Department consisted of a number of individual bureaus which some people described as the Department being a confederation of bureaus without being necessarily hitched to the Department's wagon. A program staff was set up to develop consistency between agency programs so that there would be a chance to look at the longer term conservation problems and develop a systematic program over a period of years to work toward the goals. EXAMPLE OF WORK OF STAFF Now, I can give you an example. In the range management problem on public lands we have a large range revegetation problem due to overgrazing, with which most everybody who has studied the problem is familiar. Range revegetation, reseeding, and so on, is required. The dimension of this total problem can, in a sense, be a goal that the Bureau of Land Management will work toward and we hope that we will be able to schedule a regular program each year over a period of years to accomplish that goal. Then you get into situations where the Park Service, the Bureau of Reclamation, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs also have problems which are comparable or parallel to this. It is part of the job of this staff to try to pull these together and wherever frictions develop try to iron those out. We have field committee chairmen within the various regions who work with the Bureaus to try to keep the frictions from developing and, if they do get out of hand to the point where we hear about them, this is the place where we in the Washington staff probably will have to call the various Bureau chiefs together to iron out some of these things. REASON FOR EXPANSION OF STAFF Chairman HAYDEN. Then the Secretary wants to expand the number of the staff because he thinks the amount of work is greater; is that it? Mr. STODDARD. Yes. If we are going to do any of this long range scheduling of conservation programs in the field, we have to do something more than a year to year "brush fire" operations to try to cover this or that, but rather to see what our longer term requirements are and to develop our programs so that they will work toward those goals. If we can get them well enough defined all the way across the board in all of the resource fields, we establish a built-in situation which will make it possible for all of the Bureaus to pull together much more easily. This takes quite a little time to do because we have a lot of day to day jobs as well which have occupied the staff as it is presently constituted. We have a legislative analysis chore that we work on. We have a lot of special staff studies dealing with such matters as the Bureau of the Budget Circular A-47. We are also making a special study in the upper Missouri. In response to the President's special message on natural resources we have attempted to develop a total estimate of what all the kinds of programs and practices are that are needed in the natural resources field. Chairman HAYDEN. Do you have questions? NUMBER OF POSITIONS INVOLVED Senator MUNDT. Yes. How many positions are involved here all together? Mr. STODDARD. Well, at present we have 19 and under the new request we would go up to 43. Ten of these positions would be field positions. The staff field function is a very important one. Senator MUNDT. You are adding 24 people for this program? Senator MUNDT. What reason did the House give for rejecting this? Mr. STODDARD. Well, primarily, it was a decision based on the feeling that perhaps we could not gear ourselves up rapidly enough to undergo this expansion. Senator MUNDT. I do not know that I am necessarily against this concept but it does seem that asking for 24 people is asking for quite a number of people after having looked at the situation for 90 days or so. On the basis of your presentation there may be good and valid reasons which did not occur to me and, as I say, I am not necessarily against it but I do not believe you have presented a very convincing selling prospectus for a team of 24 employees to undertake jobs which have never been done before. REASON FOR HOUSE REDUCTION Mr. BEASLEY. Senator, if I may respond to your first question as to the reason given by the House for the reduction, they stated in the report that it appeared to them that, in view of the number of people on the staff of the respective program assistant secretaries, this particular staff would not need as many employees as were requested. I would like to make this statement regarding the House explanation of its reduction: that the program assistant secretaries are involved in the day-to-day operations of the Department and the demands upon their time do not give them an opportunity to look into the planning requirements of the Department of the very programs that they are managing from day-to-day. This program staff is to provide the secretary with this overall planning which Mr. Stoddard has explained. POSSIBLE DELEGATION OF STAFF MEMBERS Senator MUNDT. I would think perhaps if you would start out on a more modest basis and perhaps let each one of your constituent States of this confederacy you speak of delegate a man or two to work with a more modest request with people at the top and that then having demonstrated to the Congress and the country that there was progress being made and a need for this, this might logically grow into the type of counsel of elders that you seem to have in mind. It does seem a little strange to me that you jump from nothing to 24 in connection with an idea which has not been tried because, unless your Department is different from any other I know of down here, there are very few of the bureaus that could not appoint a delegate on a temporary basis until the next appropriation presentation comes, one individual to meet with others to bring about what I think is a very desirable objective which is a coordinated forward-looking plan. RETURN TO PRIOR STAFF STATUS Mr. STODDARD. Actually, this appropriation request puts us back to about where they were about 2 years ago when a decision was made to decentralize the staff to some of the assistant secretaries and the feeling was that part of this function could be performed at that level. The assistant secretaries can handle the problems that come in between their bureaus but this does not get at a total departmental approach to the natural resources problems. One of the things that we do have a need for is a field staff and one reason that it may look large is that this same thing happened to the field committee chairmen who also are an important part of the activity and their salaries had to be raised from other types of activities. We would like to have them, since they are responsible to us, come under our staff budget. Senator MUNDT. Would this put sort of captains over all of your regional officers? You have a regional Indian office and then you have a field office with someone watching him to be sure that he is coordinating with a regional Office of Reclamation. INTERAGENCY COMMITTEE Mr. STODDARD. They have an interagency committee, Senator, which usually meets four times a year and then all problems which come up between bureaus and even between this Department and the Department of Agriculture-which are often in the same general resource situation-which provides a common denominator for reconciling natural conflicts between the agency programs. Mr. BEASLEY. I might explain to the Senator the situation that he is quite familiar with. That is the Missouri Basin Field Committee which attempts to coordinate the work of all of the interior agencies and works with other Federal agencies in coordinating the related work with other Federal agencies. The field committees would not be captains over the regional directors or field officers. Senator MUNDT. Is there something unique about the way we do it in the Missouri River Basin? We have had these interagency committees for a long time. Do they not function in other places besides there? Mr. BEASLEY. Not in the same form as the Missouri Basin Field Committee. We did not have a fully staffed committee in Alaska, for instance, nor the southwest United States or the northeastern part of the United States like we do have in the Missouri River Basin with which you are familiar. COORDINATING GROUPS IN OTHER AGENCIES Chairman HAYDEN. I might ask this question. Take another department like Agriculture that has various agencies. Do they have a coordinating committee there in the Agriculture Department? Mr. BEASLEY. They do have a coordinating committee but I am not sufficiently familiar to explain the similarity with our proposal. Senator MUNDT. I think they could buttress their request perhaps if they would show in one of their companion departments like Agriculture how they handle it and how many people are involved and what the functions are because they do have varied types of responsibilities as you have. Maybe they are not quite as heterogeneous but they have a lot of different bureaus functioning with people in them and there have been complaints from the field that sometimes one division of the Department of Agriculture does not seem to know what the other division is doing. Mr. STODDARD. Our effort in doing this with this staff is to try to meet that criticism in a way that we can turn it into a constructive means of eliminating overlapping and duplication. If we do our job, I think we will save more money than this budget will require. Chairman HAYDEN. Are there any further questions? Senator Bible? Senator BIBLE. I have no questions, Mr. Chairman. |