532 NATIONAL OiCEANOGRAPHIC PROGRAM LEGISLATION 



Mr, Casey. Your personnel comes from the Navy. Do they limit 

 you on the number of personnel you can have there, and does the 

 Board feel that you have all the personnel you should have there ? 



Mr. Bader. Well, the fact that they do come from Navy billets does 

 have some effect. The Navy has only a specific number of billets and 

 if some are utilized for NODC, it obviously may have some effect on 

 the rest of the Navy. But I do not think we have any real strong feel- 

 ing that there is not sufficient personnel on the Data Center staff to con- 

 duct the work that is now being done. 



Mr. Casey. I know you do not want to be critical of the Navy, and 

 you are not critical of the Navy, because you know what their other 

 obligations are, and that is what we are getting to, is that their other 

 obligations are so much more important to their specific assignment 

 than furnishing personnel to the Data Center that it does have, as you 

 say, some effect on the more rapid expansion of the Data Center, be- 

 cause the personnel comes from the Navy and if they put too many in 

 there it will cramp something else ? 



Mr. Bader. I do feel, sir, that if this type of an imposition on the 

 Navy billets was not there, that the data center could expand faster. 

 However, I do not think that it is necessary nor do I think that it is 

 wise for a data center of any sort or even a research program to expand 

 too rapidly. It has to expand on a relatively well-planned basis. 



Mr. Casey. Let us pin it down, Doctor. First, you said you felt 

 we — I presume you were speaking about the Board — felt that it could 

 expand more rapidly than it had. Also, you felt that the fact that 

 the personnel were Navy billeted had some effect, and I presumed it 

 was not a salutary effect or you would not said it had some effect on 

 the expansion of the operation, so the setup could stand some improve- 

 ment. 



Now, what it will take is something else ? 

 Mr. Bader. Correct. 



Mr. Casey. And the fact that we are having these hearings is that 

 so many of these functions do come from various agencies and you do 

 not have the opportunity. In other words, for someone to come be- 

 fore a congressional committee or appropriations conunittee and say 

 the data center needs this and this, and you have appropriations, 

 specifically for the data center. 



Those are some of the things that we are exploring and want to get 

 into here. 



Mr. Ha WORTH. Mr. Chairman, if I could interrupt for a minute to 

 go back to an earlier question about whether all the agencies were 

 contributing their data to the data center, and you mentioned the 22 

 agencies and bureaus and so on. 



Of course, the 9 members of the Board represent more than 9 of 

 these 22, because they are in Commerce and Interior and so on. 



Mr. Casey, I understand that, and I can readily understand, too, 

 where most likely where you make a grant or the Navy makes a grant 

 to a private institution or an educational institution, why, you require 

 that all of their findings go into the center. 



Doctor, you mentioned the shortage of vessels, that you were trying 

 to work on that. How do you get together and try to determine 

 who is going to ask for vessels, research vessels, oceanography vessels. 

 and so forth? 



