1200 
I certainly respect your position that as a member of the adminis- 
tration you are bound to wait until the Ash Committee makes its 
recommendations. 
I judge from something you said that you have knowledge of the 
fact nat the Ash Committee is actively considering this matter right 
now. 
Dr. DuBrincz. Yes, I talked with Roy Ash the other day. He is an 
old friend of mine, and I chatted with him about it and he assured. 
me that this was on their agenda and they were getting at it. 
Mr. Mosuer. I had hoped from the tone of the President’s request 
to the Ash Committee that this matter of reorganization in the ocean 
efforts would be a matter of priority consideration by the Ash Com- 
mission. Do you think that that is true? 
Dr. DuBrines. I think that that is true, but I am afraid that there 
are several other priority matters, too, and I don’t know how this one 
stands with respect to others. 
Mr. Mosusr. Now, to get back to your own statement, you definitely 
assure us that the administration has not closed the door, has not taken 
any firm position at all, negative or affirmative, on the NOAA 
recommendation. 
You have expressed, of course, some doubts and you have pointed to 
some considerations that have to be made and I certainly respect that, 
but the administration has not closed the door ? 
Dr. DuBrincr. No, there is no firm proposal or attitude from the 
administration which has yet evolved. I think all of us can see problems 
in the particular NOAA structure which has been proposed by the 
Stratton Commission, at least problems in doing it suddenly and in a 
revolutionary sort of way. 
There are very severe problems, political, organizational, structural, 
financial, and so on, but these are problems and not necessarily barriers 
to constructing some kind of a new organization. I am sure these are 
the problems ‘that you will be considering as you think about this 
matter. 
Mr. Mosuer. In your remarks on page 3 and in several other places 
you even suggest that we should be considering a larger reorganiza- 
tion to bring in even other elements, and so I “judge you don’t close 
the door at all on reorganization. 
Dr. DuBriwwer. That 1s right, but I made that point only to express 
my feeling that this is an enormous problem and is widely spread 
throughout the whole Federal structure and there are many related 
problems. You can’t stop at the beach line and say, “The ocean begins 
here and the land ends here,” because the two interact so intimately 
and in so many ways. 
The pollution that comes into the ocean comes from the land and the 
land activities and the erosion and so on. 
The atmosphere interacts very intimately with the ocean as well as 
the land. Therefore, if you are going to include everything related, 
you could include the whole world. You would include the whole prob- 
lem of the environment. Therefore, a line has to be drawn, and it is 
going to be an arbitrary line, and I simply wanted to point out the 
difficulty that there is no logical line at which to say we will include 
these and exclude those. This has to be a matter of political judgment, 
of organizational feeling, as well as of the scientific and technological 
factors that are involved. 
