33 



turned over to one agency. It was quite i)ossible to build a building, 

 put five men in it and say, "You have all the atoms in the world; you 

 can deal them out in a bushel basket or in a teaspoon, but they are 

 yours. You have the sole right to dispense with them." 



The National Aeronautics and Space Administration offered super- 

 ficial guidance to us in that it was the task of NAwSA to explore a 

 dimension, outer space. Obviously in this field of ocean sciences we 

 are again exploring a dimension. However, there is an extremely 

 important difference. When NASA was set up, it was conceived as a 

 vehicle to engage in a venture which in most respects was totally new. 

 There was a necessity for organizing a vast effort which had very few 

 precedents. But in this field of the ocean sciences and technology and 

 engineering, we were really dealing with a number of activities which 

 were already in existence, which were involving quite substantial 

 sums of money and which were involving substantial numbers of 

 people. 



Nevertheless, they were activities scattered through a number of 

 agencies and not necessarily coordinated. Our conchision was that 

 what we should try to achieve a form of organization which would 

 permit a continuing effort and which would take advantage of the 

 new knowledge that has been gained in the past few decades and bring 

 the agencies together to meet problems which are increasing very 

 rapidly. 



To give some idea of the amount of effort that is already underway, 

 the budget for the agencies which we propose to bring together, the 

 1969 budget, comes to approximately $800 million. It involves approxi- 

 mately 55,000 people in the Federal Establishment, So the problem is 

 not one of creating something new to engage in a crash program. The 

 problem is to find the most efficient and the most effective method of 

 taking the work of those agencies, of bringing it together, and there- 

 fore of getting a miaximum benefit out of all the new knowledge 

 suddenly opened up to us. 



The Commission's conclusion was that we have reached a stage in 

 our knowledge of the oceans where we can no longer keep activities 

 separated. You can no longer have one organization dealing with 

 pollution and another organization dealing with fish and another organ- 

 ization dealing with minerals with none of them talking to each other 

 and with walls between them. This not only leads to duplication of 

 effort but is a system that lacks the intellectual cross-fertilization of 

 people working on common problems who exchange ideas and who 

 exchange new discoveries and new methods. We also evolved the 

 concept of a new agency which would cover both atmospheric research 

 and oceanic research because it seemed quite apparent from many of 

 our studies that any separation between the two had a certain arti- 

 ficiality. 



Therefore, what we proposed was to bring together the Environ- 

 mental Services Agency, Coast Guard, Bureau of Commercial Fish- 

 eries, plus those aspects of the Bureau of Sports Fisheries and Wildlife 

 which apply to anadromous and marine and coastal fish and the 

 Great Lakes survey and we added the Sea Grant program and the 

 National Oceanographic Data Center. We thought this new agency 

 should be an independent agency reporting directly to the President 

 because it seemed to us that if we are going to give a subject like this 

 the prominemoe that it deserves and if this new agency is going to 



