SCI! \< 1 l\ THE WHITE HOI SI 651 



PRESIDENT CARTER AND Till 1976 ACT 



Sonic members of the committee were apprehensive that President 

 Carter's campaign against the Washington establishment would spill 

 over into a downgrading of the scientific machinery so laboriously put 



together in the 1976 act. Subsequent events showed there was some 

 reason for such apprehension. But there was general praise for President 

 Carter's selection of Dr. Frank Press, chairman of the Department of 

 Earth and Planetary Sciences at MIT, as the new OSTP Director and 

 the President's Science Adviser Teague circulated background infor- 

 mation on Dr. Press to all committee members in March. Fuqua, 

 Thornton, Wydler, and Hollenbeck invited Dr. Press to meet with 

 them in Fuqua s office on the afternoon of April 5 two days before 

 he appeared for confirmation hearings in the Senate. At the meeting, 

 Dr. Press was interested to discover that the committee members 

 knew far more about the dimensions of his job than he did, as a result 

 of the years of hard work on the legislation establishing his office. 



At the end of April, the OMB sent a form letter with a duplicated 

 signature to Teague indicating that a reorganization plan covering the 

 Executive Office of the President would be sent to the Congress in 

 June. Responding to the invitation for comments, Teague on May 16 

 stated: 



I would like to comment, in particular, on the importance of the Office of Science 

 and Technology Policy (OSTP), and I strongly urge that it be retained in substantially 

 its present role and structure. 



Teague especially urged that the reorganization plan should insure 

 "maintenance of the OSTP as a source of science policy development 

 and application at the highest level of Government." He also stressed 

 "the importance of the science and technology survey included in 

 title III of the act." This title provided for a temporary President's 

 Committee on Science and Technology of 8 to 14 Presidentially ap- 

 pointed members who would survey and report on the overall Federal 

 science, engineering, and technology effort, with an interim report in 

 12 months and a final report within two years. 



PRESIDENT CARTERS REORGANIZATION PLAN 



In spite of the fact that Dr. Press was sworn into office on June 1. 

 there remained a great deal of uncertainty concerning the management 

 of science policy. The questions were not fully answered when President 

 Carter sent his reorganization plan to the Congress on July 15 The plan 

 retained OSTP, but radically changed some of the requirements in the 

 1976 act. Teague felt the effect of the plan was important enough for 



