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or internal contractors. EPA needs to push hard toward a system which will reward 

 the many dedicated researchers at EPA, cull out the laggards, and recruit, nurture 

 and reward talented young scientists and engineers. 



Creating this climate in the EPA R&D establishment is essential and it must 

 come from the top. In my opinion, EPA ORD needs to be reorganized to give more 

 autonomy to its fundamental research mission. A new R&D division emphasizing 

 anticipatory, fundamental research needs to be created, managed by highly re- 

 spected scientists and engineers who are given a freer hand to make EPA a first 

 class research organization. A new model is needed which taps the external research 

 community for leadership, more in the style of the National Science Foundation and 

 the National Institutes of Health. In this model, EPA OR&D staff would be in closer 

 touch with the external research community and would, in most cases, return to re- 

 search positions in academia or industry after their term with EPA. This will lead 

 to a more robust R&D administration and to more imaginative and innovative re- 

 search. 



EPA needs to completely revamp the way it is using the external community for 

 research. EPA must also draw more on the academic community for assistance in 

 its research program, both fundamental and applied. All who know about the exter- 

 nal grants and cooperative agreement program know that it is a shambles. From 

 the exploratory research office, proposals are called for, slowly reviewed and then 

 sit upon desks for years awaiting funding. The review committees are constituted 

 by curious rules involving external contractors and it is highly likely that committee 

 members will be reviewing proposals out of their area of expertise, led by EPA staff- 

 ers who are not involved in research nor have been for many years. The result of 

 this ineptness has caused me and many of my colleagues to avoid the exploratory 

 research program of EPA as a source of support for our students and research. It 

 is just not worth the hassle. 



Congress should assist EPA in the effective use of cooperative agreements. The 

 academic community is now very confused about the rules for awarding and admin- 

 istering cooperative agreements. There appear to be new rules that prohibit effective 

 collaboration of academia and EPA toward common research goals, and the paper- 

 work obstacles are very formidable. There also appear to be major differences be- 

 tween how the various EPA research laboratories operate in their relations with the 

 academic communities, so the rules for cooperative agreements are not clear. In 

 short, many serious investigators in this country simply don't want to fool with EPA 

 and we all lose. Congress needs to look into the process by which EPA works with 

 academia, streamline it, and make it more productive. 



A new mechanism is needed to encourage more highly qualified individuals to 

 enter and remain in environmental protection careers. The fields of environmental 

 science, engineering and management are exciting and challenging careers, but at 

 the present time there are an inadequate number of opportunities for qualified stu- 

 dents to pursue graduate degrees. There are two reasons for this, in my opinion. 

 First, there is the uncertain situation for the funding of exploratory research. Sec- 

 ondly, graduate traineeships programs for graduate students in the environmental 

 sciences are very rare. I am very pleased to see in S. 1545 provisions for graduate 

 traineeships (Sec. 5 (c) ) but it appears to be only a modest beginning. Graduate 

 traineeships are needed in environmental engineering, science and management, 

 particularly for minorities and women, and should not be limited to a few States. 



Finally, may I say that we need to develop programs to attract high quality sci- 

 entists and engineers in the basic sciences to work on environmental problems. We 

 need programs that will link environmental science and engineering programs such 

 as mine with departments of chemistry, physics, geology and biology. This will en- 

 courage scientists in those departments to consider working on environmental sys- 

 tems and in the process, bring new techniques and talents to environmental R&D. 

 This type of expertise will be increasingly valuable in the future as we shift our 

 R&D effort from the remediation of old sins to pollution prevention. Pollution pre- 

 vention will require more R&D on fundamental science to effect process modifica- 

 tions and create new manufactured products so as to minimize or eliminate wastes. 

 I am hopeful that NSF and other agencies that support basic science will see the 



