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new facilities, calling for an amount of money nearly four time the 

 current average annual facilities construction budget. 

 Subsequently, in the 1991 Fiscal Year budget, the USDA proposed a 

 competitive grants program for facilities, only to see Congress 

 discard it and use the f reed-up funds for more earmarks. 



USDA ••SWAT" teams. In response to congressional pressure to 

 reorganize USDA, former Secretary of Agriculture Edward Madigan 

 established a number of "SWAT" teams to review the field structure 

 of the Department. Despite the fact that other field agencies had 

 thousands of offices as opposed to less than 200 research sites and 

 despite the fact that problems in research facilities triggered the 

 entire review, USDA provided data to Congress on everything but 

 research. 



USDA did establish criteria with which to evaluate all federal 

 agricultural field locations, including ARS sites. Upon applying 

 these criteria to ARS facilities, USDA personnel identified 52 

 facilities — nearly half of all ARS locations — as suspect and 

 requiring careful scrutiny by the agency administrator. Although 

 this review was due to be completed and presented to Congress, 

 despite repeated requests for the information, to date no formal 

 submission of the data has been made. 



VI. RECOMMENDATIONS 



I know this Subcommittee is committed to facilities reform. 

 While the underlying debate regarding science and planning must be 

 resolved, I offer four specific recommendations to curtail further 

 erosion of our facilities system: 



- Impose a moratorium on all new facility construction until 

 a long-term solution is found as recommended by the Users 

 Advisory Board in testimony before this Subcommittee last 



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