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Mr. Foil. If I may, Mr. Chairman, there's one way in which the 

 funding mechanism impacts the educational component, and that 

 is that the formula funds are perceived in the academic arena as 

 being funds that can be used for long-term commitments to faculty 

 salaries, to faculty members, and that directly impacts particularly 

 graduate education. Competitive grants and special grants are 

 rightly considered as short-term funds that should not be invested 

 in a long-term commitment, and as we've seen this shift that was 

 outlined in the original chart, we have, in a number of our institu- 

 tions, had difficulty maintaining the balance between the edu- 

 cational mission and the research mission because of the mecha- 

 nism of funding that was not as amenable to that balance. 



Mr. DOOLEY. Well, then, as my final question, the trends that 

 were identified on the chart which showed the formula ftmding de- 

 clining, which obviously, I guess — and I understand the impact 

 that the decline can have on the education and certainly the nimi- 

 ber of staff people or educators and professors you can bring on. Is 

 there a consensus among you that that trend ought to be reversed 

 and that the formula fimding ought to be increasing and that we 

 get back more to the allocation that we saw in the 1985 levels? 



Mr. Fischer. If I may, the chart that was up earlier was on a 

 percentage basis, so the actual dollars did not decrease. 



Mr. DoOLEY. Right. No, I'm talking about relatively. Have we 

 gone in the right direction or the wrong direction? 



Mr. Fischer. The nature of the formula funds has been that they 

 have not kept pace with the inflationary efforts. There has to be 

 the balance that we talked about earlier. We believe that the Na- 

 tional Research Initiative fi-om a competitive basis is good, it's 

 solid, has this administration's support where we believe that the 

 formula funds — as I said in my statement, we should at least main- 

 tain an inflationary edge on that funding in order to enhance those 

 types of programs, and we believe that there's a need for special 

 research grants to address pertinent issues that need to be ad- 

 dressed that come up, as you know, as I know, suddenly — the com 

 blight — some of these issues that come popping up at us that we 

 cannot anticipate and they don't fit in the legislative process. 



Mr. Dooley. You folks are on the frontlines here dealing with 

 these different problems. Are we better off with the allocations as 

 they are relative in 1993, or would we be better off and getting 

 more for our investment of research dollars as we saw them in 

 1985 where we did see a greater relative percentage in the formula 

 funding versus the earmarked and the competitive, or does it make 

 any difference whatsoever? 



Mr. Fischer. The total funds have gone up. Formula fimds 

 stayed the same. Total funds have gone up. So comparing now to 

 then is the challenge we have that in 1985 we had about the same 

 dollars as in 1992. However, they were not adjusted for inflation 

 to that in the formula. 



Mr. Dooley. So you're basically not prepared to say that we'd be 

 better off having the same percentage of the total funding for re- 

 search allocated to the formiila funds as we did in 1985? 



Mr. Fischer. What I would say is that the National Academy of 

 Sciences study and what was in the 1990 farm bill with the Na- 



