8 



Finally, our committee stipulated that whatever it proposed 

 would not require major structural changes in the Executive and 

 Legislative branches. To do so would have obviously been naive. 

 However, we did suggest procedural changes that are in the realm 

 of possibility. 



And let me go to some of the recommendations. 



The heart of our report is the proposal for a budget process that 

 provides both a unitary view of the federal science and technology 

 enterprise, in addition to separate science and technology agencies 

 Congress has been used to receiving. 



In this way. Congress will be able to gauge the overall health of 

 the enterprise, the adequacy of the overall funding, the manner in 

 which it meets the nation's needs, and understand the inter- 

 relationships and complexities among the governmental programs. 



As this Committee knows well, while federal R&D spending to- 

 tals are conventionally given as about $70 billion a year, nearly 

 half of that involves initial production, maintenance, and upgrad- 

 ing of large-scale weapons and space systems in the departments 

 of Defense, Energy, and at NASA. 



These activities are clearly of importance and in the national in- 

 terest. But with some modest exceptions, these are neither long- 

 term investments in new knowledge, nor investments in creating 

 substantially new applications. 



They do not fit the usual definition of R&D. 



If they were excluded, the real R&D investment budget which we 

 call the federal science and technology budget in this report, which 

 would be about $35 to $40 billion a year annually. 



The FS&T, or federal science and technology, budget defines fed- 

 eral investments in fundamental science and new technologies. It 

 is these investments that, in aggregate, lead to new knowledge and 

 enabling technologies, which, over time, improve government per- 

 formance, meet important national needs, such as health, environ- 

 ment, resources, security, economic growth, and enrich the nation. 



Put another way, the committee came to believe that the many 

 arguments of support for basic versus applied research, of support 

 for basic research in one agency versus another, of U.S. spending 

 versus that of other nations, and even what we spend as a fraction 

 of GNP, misses the point. 



The key was to devise a process to formulate an FS&T budget 

 that would maintain our world strength in science and technology 

 and thus better serve the needs of the American people. 



Concomitant with this proposed addition to the structure of the 

 federal budget for science and technology were procedures for using 

 it to make real decisions by both the Executive Branch and the 

 Congress. 



The committee adopted several principles to assure that the fed- 

 eral science and technology programs maintained their base within 

 the federal departments, maintained their excellence and their his- 

 toric ability to respond quickly to crises, national needs, and oppor- 

 tunities. 



And these are some of the principles: 



First, trade-offs within the FS&T budget. That is, selective de- 

 creases and increases to meet new national needs to reflect evalua- 

 tions of quality and to recognize budget stringency when necessary. 



