to 



deep submergence research could not be supported this year due to 

 inequity in the way budget reductions were allocated in the 

 earmark . 



b) Does this create a situation where good proposals are 

 left undone while other less deserving ones get funded simply 

 because of the region in which they are proposed? 



Answer: Yes. It removes the ability of the National Office 

 program managers to allocate funds according to proposal quality 

 identified in the peer review process. Some centers had to 

 drasticaly reduce support or decline to support proposals with 

 high panel rankings while other centers were allowed to support 

 proposals with much lower rankings. This process could be 

 enhanced by concordant reviews and ratings of proposals but that 

 requires changing calendars, not possible with a heavily 

 partitioned allocation. 



c) Does NOAA make any effort to ensure that NURP funding is 

 allocated in a manner that fairly meets the research needs of 

 each region of the country? 



Answer: Yes. The regions assigned to the six NXJRP centers 

 include the coastal zone of every region of the country. Each 

 center produces a yearly request for proposals (including a 

 statement of research needs incorporating guidance developed by 

 the National Office) that is widely distributed to institutions 

 and researchers both within and beyond the specific region of the 

 centers' responsibility. The recommendation to the centers by 

 the National Office is to support the best proposals identified 

 in the peer review process without any regional bias. 



3) As you may recall, last year the House passed a bill 

 officially authorizing NXJRP and designating regions for undersea 

 research. 



a) By using the designations from the bill, and using the FY 

 1993 appropriation of $16 million, could you break down the 

 amount of money spent on research in each region? Specifically, 

 how much was used for undersea research in the Gulf of Mexico? 



Answer: The table below lists the approximate level of 

 support for projects in the 10 regions listed in the bill. In 

 developing this table, the administrative costs and the cost of 

 maintaining operations support staff are prorated based on the 

 relative costs for science projects in each region. This 

 reporting method is necessary due to the difficulty of assigning 

 specific "fixed" administrative and operations costs to specific 

 regional research projects in the cases where a center has 

 responsibility for more than one region. 



