million tons of hake at least seasonally off southern California. 

 They are not used by anybody. They can be caught, practi- 

 cally, only by midwater trawl. A fishing vessel, under antique 

 California law, cannot have a trawl aboard south of the Santa 

 Barbara- Ventura county border. 



I would not contend that a million dollars invested in state 

 fishery laboratories would, at the present stage of history, 

 yield as much new knowledge and understanding of the ocean 

 and its resources as if it were invested in research at federal 

 laboratories and academic institutions. What I do say is that 

 there is not much use in having new knowledge and under- 

 standing if you can't use them. We will only begin to free 

 up our use of the ocean when the knowledge and understanding 

 required for that freeing up is acquired and applied at the state 

 level. 



A start was made in this direction this year under Public 

 Law 88-309 adopted by the last Congress, thanks again to the 

 initiative of Senator Magnuson. Under its provisions, sums 

 are to be made available to the states on a matching fund basis 

 for these purposes up to a total of $5,000,000 per year for a 

 five year period. Naturally, and unfortunately for fishery de- 

 velopment, the Bureau of the Budget subtracted the sums ac- 

 tually authorized for this purpose in the President's Budget for 

 FY 1966 from the normal increases projected for the Bureau 

 of Commercial Fisheries, so no net new money gain for ocean 

 work was made, but that is about the best that could be 

 expected from a land and space oriented Bureau of the Budget. 

 The House Appropriations Committee in marking up the 

 Interior Budget Bill in early April recognized the inequity of 

 this conservatism to the national interest and appropriated 

 twice the amount for these purposes that the Bureau of the 

 Budget had allowed. 



Academic Fisheries Institutions 



Much has been made of the fact that the National Ocean- 

 ographic Program Budget has risen from a level of about $24 

 million in 1957 to $123 million in 1964, and (perhaps) $141 

 million in 1966. No real complaint can be made by those 

 interested in the budget of the Federal Bureau of Commercial 

 Fisheries because it has participated in this general rise of money 

 for ocean research. Furthermore, it has used the new money 

 well. 



The people who have been almost completely left out of this 

 increase, oddly enough, are the academic fisheries institutions. 

 The academic oceanography institutions have done very well. 

 Funding is available for their work from the National Science 

 Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, the National Insti- 

 tutes of Health, the Atomic Energy Commission, etc. But 

 when a fishery scientist in a university makes a request for a 

 research grant from one of these funding agencies, he is asked 

 to take his business to the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries. For 

 this reason there are not many fishery scientists in academic 

 institutions in this country. The top young men go to the 

 fields where money and exciting prospects are available. For 

 these reasons the training of high quality fishery scientists 

 languishes. 



The Bureau of Commercial Fisheries budget, like that of 

 most agencies of government, is established primarily for the 

 support of in-house research and other activities. It fights 

 for its budget increases in the Department of the Interior and 

 in the Bureau of the Budget on that basis. It has the authority 

 to make research grants to academic institutions and it does 

 so on a small scale, but what money it uses for this purpose 

 comes out of its regular appropriations for its own laboratories. 

 It is naturally reluctant to favor academic fishery laboratories 

 over its own, which are under steady pressure to get out more 

 research results more quickly. 



The result of all this is that academic fisheries research in 

 the United States remains funded by state legislatures, a notably 

 poor place from which to get ocean or other research funds. 

 Accordingly, academic oceanographic institutions have grown 

 like the green bay tree and academic fishery institutions have 

 continued to starve. A natural result is that bright young 

 men go where the money and excitement is, not to the dull, 

 static, fishery fields. 



All of this adds further to the difficulty noted above of hav- 

 ing the fishery research done on the federal level and the fishery- 

 regulation done on the state level. 



The Organization of Ocean Research 



From what has been said above one might think that ocean 

 research on the federal level and in the academic institutions 

 has been thriving at a satisfactory rate. Nothing could be 

 further from the case. While the National Oceanographic 

 Program budget has been gradually working its way up from 

 an annual level of $24 million to $140 million, the National 

 Space Program budget has come from about zero to well over 

 $5 billion. 



There is general support for the astronomical space budget 

 and as a taxpayer I have no complaints of consequence about 

 it either. The excitement and venturesomeness of learning 

 about space is pay enough when one can afford it, and we all 

 feel that we should at least keep up with the Russians even if we 

 can't seem to pull very far ahead. Also our experience with 

 basic research in this century indicates reasonable odds that 

 all of this will pay off in the long run in some unexpected way. 

 There is no question in anybody's mind that the impact of the 

 space program on United States industry has not already been 

 considerable. 



But the industry associated with the ocean is also growing 

 restless for support. The extent of this was indicated last year 

 by an Ad Hoc Committee of the National Security Industry- 

 Association which considered and reported upon the National 

 Ocean Program. It recommended the establishment of a Na- 

 tional Ocean Science and Technology Agency quite frankly 

 modeled on the Space Agency. It recommended budget levels 

 for it of $900 million in 1965 rising to $3,100 million in 1970. 



The Congress also grows increasingly restless. Senator 

 Magnuson, for himself and nineteen other Senators, has re- 

 introduced his bill to establish a National Oceanographic 

 Council (S944). A number of identical bills have been filed 

 in the House. Senator Bartlett, for himself and others, intro- 



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