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international policy formulation. However, even this program was not adequately 

 balanced to meet the complete needs of the decision makers. While NASA, NOAA 

 and NSF developed a robust program to understand quantitatively the impact of 

 human activities on the abundance and distribution of ozone, agencies responsible 

 for impacts research did not aggressively pursue a program to understand the impli- 

 cations of ozone depletion on human health, ecological and economic systems. 



As the CENR subcommittees develop their research strategies and implementa- 

 tion plans, they will explicitly consider both near- and long-term priorities. 



Approach To Redress the Imbalance Between Intramural and Extramural R&D by 

 Utilizing Merit Review, Peer Evaluation and Competitive Selection in Federal 

 R&D Projects 



The Administration plans increase the involvement of the academic community 

 through merit review, peer-evaluation and the competitive selection of Federal R&D 

 projects. In addition, we plan to improve the evaluation procedures and quality of 

 Federal R&D efforts. The style of external peer-review may, in some instances, need 

 to be tailored according to agency mission. 



The Administration believes that the imbalance between extramural and intra- 

 mural R&D programs is a significant weakness of our Federal environmental R&D 

 system. "Intramural" refers to those R&D programs conducted within a department 

 or agency and its laboratories. Extramural programs are activities supported by the 

 Federal government through grants, contracts, cooperative research and develop- 

 ment agreements, or other mechanisms. Some agencies have relatively large extra- 

 mural programs. NASA's Mission to Planet Earth program, for example, is ail com- 

 petitively peer-reviewed and has a large extramural component. Other agency pro- 

 grams are almost entirely intramural. EPA's extramural program includes univer- 

 sity-based research (i.e., through grants and cooperative research agreements) and 

 contract research, but the agency has limited funding for competitive grants. This 

 deprives the agency of a mechanism to reach many of the best academic scientists 

 and engineers in the nation. The Administration proposes that all Federal agencies 

 take a careful look at the balance between intramural and extramural environ- 

 mental R&D activities within their agencies with the goal of increasing the involve- 

 ment of the academic community by competitively awarding most R&D activities, 

 in a manner similar to NSF and NASA. In addition, there may be instances where 

 the quality of the research endeavor may be strengthened by combining the intellec- 

 tual talent residing in the universities with the institutional capabilities of the Fed- 

 eral laboratories, thus improving the overall quality and cost-effectiveness of then 

 Federal research program. 



Following procedures put in place by the Committee on Earth and Environmental 

 Sciences for the U.S. Global Change Research Program, we plan to develop perform- 

 ance standards and foster a process of measuring progress, identifying gaps, and as- 

 sessing the effectiveness of agency activities. In this management arrangement, 

 meaningful performance measures for major elements of the CENR strategy will be 

 developed and tracked, providing periodic evaluations of both individual projects 

 and the strategy as a whole. 



Increased Funding for Ecological and Social Sciences, and for Funding Engineering 

 Solutions to Environmental Problems 



The Administration recognizes that there has been insufficient attention to the ec- 

 ological sciences, the socioeconomic dimensions of environmental problems, and for 

 engineering solutions to environmental problems. 



Biological sciences: The ecological sciences are clearly underfunded in comparison 

 to the physical sciences in the study of some environmental issues, e.g., climate 

 change and ozone depletion. In 1993 the FCCSET Subcommittee for Environmental 

 Biology performed an analysis of the Federal environmental biology budget and re- 

 ported an annual expenditure of over $900 million, a level comparable to that spent 

 on the study of the physical and chemical aspects of global change. However, the 

 NRC Corson report noted that 50 percent of all ecological experiments are per- 

 formed on plots of less than one meter squared, and only 7 percent last longer than 

 7 years. This suggests that more long-term, large scale ecological studies need to 



