certain amount of strain and discontent has been generated. Some con- 

 cern has been reported that the process of initiating and planning new 

 projects has not been sufficiently open to input from all parts of the 

 scientific community. There has been disappointment expressed that the 

 IDOE Office has not provided funds for individual scientists seeking to 

 participate in IDOE projects of other nations. And these has been some 

 feeling that j)roblems of major importance, especially in the area of open 

 ocean biology, have not received the attention they deserve. These criti- 

 cisms have been voiced directly to the IDOE Office which ameliorated 

 some of the situations described. 



These management problems have been a consequence of introducing 

 "big science" into a scientific community accustomed to an atmosphere 

 of "little science," and some strain in achieving mutual accommodation 

 was to be expected and has occurred. Another source of difficulty has 

 been the fact that the level at which the IDOE has been funded (ap- 

 proximately $15 million per year, as compared with estimates that at 

 least $50 to $100 million per year would be required) is not sufficient to 

 permit taking on all the work that needs to be done. Further, NSF strives 

 to avoid duplicating the areas of responsibility of Federal mission agencies. 



While we think NSF has done well in managing its IDOE program 

 within the limited resources available, we find it a matter of concern 

 that the resources have remained so constrained that important aspects 

 of the original IDOE concept, such as development of an ocean monitor- 

 ing system, could never be addressed. Preliminary plans called for a 

 partnership among the Federal agencies, industry, and the scientific com- 

 munity here and abroad, but with the exception of some Federal agency 

 involvement in its initial year, and some joint funding with ONR and 

 NOAA, the IDOE has not evolved beyond an NSF program primarily, 

 involving the U.S. academic science community alone. Although expecta? 

 tions based on the early planning studies were undoubtedly unrealistic, 

 we are not aware of any serious effort to reexamine the pros and cons 

 of pressing beyond existing budget constraints. 



On balance, we believe that the IDOE has successfully addressed 

 serious deficiencies in the present understanding of ocean processes and 

 ocean resources, has fostered interinstitutional cooperation among scien- 

 tists of many disciplines working together in the cooperative efforts re- 

 quired to tackle these deficiencies, and has done much to generate a 

 spirit of international cooperation in this area where little had existed 

 previously. We believe that NSF has been right to allocate the limited 

 funds provided to it primarily to scientific work rather than to applica- 

 tions, and that within its budgetary constraints the IDOE program has 

 been satisfactorily responsive to the original goal of advancing knowledge 

 about ocean resources and ocean uses. We strongly advocate continuing 

 steps to build on the base that IDOE has established. 



