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At the same time, however, the federal government continues to 

 commit huge sums of money to new facilities. Today, it will cost 

 the federal government more than $700 million to complete facility 

 projects already in the construction pipeline. With the public 

 demanding that every tax-generated penny be tightly pinched. 

 Congress still has not struck an appropriate balance among new 

 facilities, existing facilities, and actual research. 



C. Facility Expenditures Have No Connection to Research 



Priorities. 



As you stated in your hearing notice, Mr. Chairman, it is 

 essential that research facility investments be consistent with the 

 needs of producers and consumers. Unfortunately, there is little 

 coordination between established research priorities and 

 expenditures for facilities. The needs of the overall system are 

 lost in the eagerness to meet demand for any particular issue or 

 commodity that finds favor in a given year. Most facilities money 

 is used to build structures for duplicative projects to serve the 

 popular cause of the moment. This hurts diversity of research 

 enterprise, as well as reinvestment in important national labs such 

 as Beltsville and the Germplasm Laboratory in Fort Collins, 

 Colorado. 



Winners and losers in the funding battle. A very important 

 aspect of setting and funding research priorities is the growing 

 disparity between university and federal facilities. Vernon 

 Ruttan, in his seminal book on agricultural research, maintains, "A 

 major issue facing the U.S. Agricultural Research Service system in 

 the future is the appropriate division of responsibility for 

 agricultural research among the federal, state, and private 

 systems . " 



To most of us, it makes little difference whether agricultural 

 research is carried out at federal or state laboratories, just so 



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