SCIENCE, RESEARCH AND TECHNOLOGY, 1970-79 533 



Even before Chairman Thornton had a chance to call an organiza- 

 tion meeting of his subcommittee, Fuqua presided over a meeting of 

 the full committee on February 1 to kick off the 1977 NSF authoriza- 

 tion hearings. While Chairman Teague was undergoing major surgery 

 at the Bethesda Naval Hospital, his committee in his absence was 

 already swept up in the whirlwind activity to get a big authorization 

 bill to the House floor by mid-March. President Carter's new agency 

 heads quickly discovered that the Science Committee was in no mood 

 to sit back passively and swallow everything fed to them across the 

 witness table. Acting NSF Director Dr. Richard C. Atkinson referred 

 on February 1, 1977, to NSF's efforts to strengthen science education, 

 but was somewhat startled to have Congressman Brown tartly ob- 

 serve : 



We have a little language difficulty still it seems to me. For example, you stressed 

 the fact that science education continues to receive strong support and so on. Yet 

 the dollar figures you give show a 1.9 percent increase for science education, which is 

 actually a real loss when you compare it to the overall impact of inflation. * * * I 

 think that you should give us the picture in real terms and not try to obfuscate it 

 bv the statements you make. 



ORGANIZATION MEETING OF THE THORNTON SUBCOMMITTEE 



On the afternoon of February 3, Thornton assembled his subcom- 

 mittee to take a long look at the challenges which faced them in the 

 two years ahead. When the Science Committee was established in 1959, 

 the National Science Foundation was working with an appropriation 

 of S136 million; the task of the Thornton subcommittee was to examine 

 an annual budget which by 1977 had risen to $885 million. Squeezing 

 out the annual inflation rate, at that time estimated at 6 percent, one 

 of the issues was just how fast NSF should grow, and how its mission 

 of strengthening the basic scientific research and education of the 

 Nation could best be accomplished. As Thornton outlined to his sub- 

 committee, this involved all kinds of decisions, such as the perennial 

 question which Brown had raised at the February 1 hearing concerning 

 the proper emphasis on support for science education — an issue which 

 always found the Science Committee placing it at a higher priority 

 than NSF. A new question facing the subcommittee was how much 

 should NSF contribute toward "indirect" (overhead) costs, which had 

 risen from the 1966 rate of one-sixth of research grants up to a startling 

 one-quarter. To many Members of Congress, looking for places to cut 

 out fat, this was a very proper area for rigorous oversight. A host of 

 other XSF-relatcd decisions faced the subcommittee, all the way from 

 how much to allocate to earthquake research to how to resolve a 

 Longstanding dispute with the Civil Service Commission over the grade 

 ratings for technical, professional, and managerial personnel Politi- 



