Mr. ROBISON. Today's statement?

Mr. CRAMTON. Yes. We start with the present level of funding. The second item assumes a 6 percent to 10 percent annual growth as a result of pay increases, increased day-by-day operating expenses, and the like. If you compound that over a 5-year period, you get to $275,000 or something in that range, $200,000 to $275,000.

Then we have the four items which I have already mentioned, and then the funding at any given moment in time of two or three major projects. What I envision is a gradual growth over the next 5 years to, hopefully, something slightly over $1 million-a doubling of the total budget request gradually over a period of time, but not all at once. We would not be able to find that many qualified people in a single year.

Mr. ROBISON. You would be willing to throw yourself on the mercies, so to speak, of this subcommittee and its counterpart in the other body of the Congress, when you come to try to justify the need for any such an increase in the next 5 years?

Mr. CRAMTON. That is right.

One point I would make in terms of eliminating the ceiling rather than raising it, is that there is a tendency toward "full funding" when there is an appropriation ceiling. It seems to me if you approach the question every year as to what is the level of funding that is appropriate for OMB and the President to request and that this committee ought to authorize, that that may produce better results than putting in a given figure. If you put in $1 million as a ceiling, there will be a tendency to go up to $1 million whether it is justified or not. Mr. ROBISON. Then, one of the remaining key points that I would highlight as you will present it to the Judiciary Committee is that elimination of the ceiling would not remove their right of legislative and other oversight over the program of the Conference.

Mr. CRAMTON. No. We very much want that.

Mr. ROBISON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. STEED. There is one thing you referred to a while ago that bothers me and this may be in an area that is beyond any scope of your activities.

You referred to the constant demand that certain people make on you for certain statistical information. The reason is they could make good use of it if they had it.

We deal here deeply in the economic policymaking part of the Government.

It gets to be a matter of how accurate this information is, how timely, how long it has been since the system of input has been really looked at. With all the computerization that goes on in Government, are we really cashing in on some of the spin-off benefits that could be had by just making one more punch in the card, so to speak?

It all adds up to the fact that there are all kinds of people doing business with the Government, doing business in areas subject to government controls, and so on, who would like to know a lot of things about its statistical facts that are not quite available in the form, or as soon as they would like to have them. I lead up to this question:

Is there any opportunity in the sort of work you do to get into an area where some honest, objective, rational thinking into this sort of

matter could be applied, with the hopeful result that government could come up not only with new and better statistical materials, but probably eliminate some that may not mean much any more.

Mr. CRAMTON. I think it is an area in which we are working on the fringes, but not directly. OMB has more of a central interest. Also, there has been a special Commission on Government Statistics that has been exploring the question of the statistical systems used by Federal agencies and their interrelationship one with the other.

We have started a very modest project on the exchange of information among Federal agencies. It comes up in connection with particular programs such as already have been mentioned. The VA may rule in favor of a disability claimant, and yet he may be denied a benefit from the Social Security System at the same time on the same claim.

There perhaps ought to be some way in which at least the information which was provided for one of those agencies at the same moment in time also gets available to the other. That is largely a problem of retrieval and availability of information.

Mr. STEED. With the VA, we know we have 24 million veterans eligible for VA benefits. Seven million of them a year come up with some claim, demand, or inquiry. It is a case history, it is a workload. It takes a number of clerks to handle 7 million inquiries.

Mr. CRAMTON. We are going to try to get at the man-hours and workload and delays involved in all of these different systems.

Mr. STEED. All of these agencies have problems like this. Of course, if Secret Service has a certain number of Government checks that have been stolen and forged, you can measure that, of course, but what is the rest of their workload? Was each one of them a legitimate thing?

Now, not that they do this job to load up their books, but it may be that over the period of years, by a proliferation, they have reached a certain way of trying to keep their finger on this kind of problem, until today it has data being collected in such a way that it really misleads rather than to add to the knowledge.

You get into the Consumer Price Index. If you had not had the intense and ongoing work of the statistical associations, and all the experts in the labor unions and trade organizations watching the Department of Labor like a hawk, the authenticity of those very important statistics might be subject to serious question.

Good statistics become good policymaking sources. We use so much of it. You know it is amazing how few people realize how many Government policies are based on so-called statistical information that they more or less just take for granted has to be right. If the source data is shaky or questionable in its quality the policy decisions won't be dependable.

It seems to me that we are always going to have statisticallyoriented policymaking and that somewhere along the line the validity and usefulness of these statistics must be reviewed. OMB does do a certain amount of this, but they get married to certain ideas, too.

One advantage I see in your staff looking at this is that you can come at it in a cold-blooded way and look at it for what it is. You are only interested in what you see. You will not approach this determined that you are going to see merit to traditional data collecting systems whether it is there or not.

Do you see what I mean?

Mr. CRAMTON. Yes, I do.

Mr. STEED. I think your operation is an area where these sorts of things can really get their best evaluation.

Mr. CRAMTON. We will consider those thoughts very seriously.

Mr. STEED. I think anything that can be done to improve the authenticity, the shortening of the time lag of all sorts of statistics that the Government uses in its business, or people who do business with the Government use in their business, will be a definite improvement. So much depends, any more, on somebody throwing out a statistic and everybody assuming that it is the gospel. Sometimes it is not at all. You can manipulate statistics pretty easily too, and sometimes mislead. Mr. ADDABBO. Have there been any administrative conferences relative to possible consolidation of all agencies involved in the drug abuse program?

Mr. CRAMTON. No. In fact, that is a question of agency structure or organization which we try to stay out of, partly because of some question about our statutory authority in the area. In any event, we would be trenching on ground that OMB thinks is peculiarly its own.

Our statute says we are to be concerned about agency process, not jurisdiction. We interpret that to mean that whether a program on drug abuse is in one office or another, is the kind of issue which OMB ought to be concerned about, and which the Government Operations Committees of Congress should be concerned about. But unless it affects what they are doing in terms of how they are handling or treating people, we would tend not to get involved in it.

Mr. ADDABBO. Are your reports, after they are complete, submitted to the President's Office or submitted to the agency that you are having a conference on?

Mr. CRAMTON. The recommendation, first, is a public document. It is made available on request to anyone who asks for them. The demand thus far has not been so great that we have not been able to supply it with our Xerox machine.

If a recommendation is directed to an agency, only one agency, we will disseminate it in that agency very thoroughly. If it is directed to the Congress, we will try to disseminate it to the committees affected and have legislation introduced which would implement it. So the distribution depends upon the nature of the report and the recommendation, but they are all public documents.

We print the recommendations in the annual report and, subsequently, in a periodic volume which contains the supporting reports for the recommendations.

Mr. ADDABBO. Are the conferences on any particular item engendered by you or are you directed by an agency or by the administration to call a conference?

Mr. CRAMTON. We have an 11-man Council. I am the only full-time, paid member of the Council, the rest of whom are all Presidential appointees for staggered 3-year terms. The Council acts essentially as a board of directors to advise me in terms of staff and budgeting and direction of activities, and also it is responsible for the agenda at plenary sessions. But our statute makes it very clear that members or a committee of the Conference that want their views to go forward not to be stymied by the Council.

Mr. ADDABBO. Thank you.

No further questions.

Mr. STEED. Gentlemen, on behalf of the committee may I express our appreciation for your appearance and your cooperation. It is a very fine presentation and we congratulate you on doing a good job.

Mr. CRAMTON. Thank you.

Mr. STEED. We will recess until 2 p.m.

Includes capital outlay as follows: 1971, $1 thousand; 1972, $1 thousand; 1973, $2 thousand.

Selected resources as of June 30 are as follows: Unpaid undelivered orders, 1970, $32 thousand; 1971, $104 thousand: 1972, $54 thousand; 1973, $24 thousand.

The Conference, established pursuant to 5 U.S.C. 571, et seq., is authorized on a permanent basis to assist the President, the Congress, the administrative agencies, and executive departments in improving existing administrative procedure. It is responsible for conducting studies of the efficiency, adequacy, and fairness of present procedures by which Federal administrative agencies and executive departments determine the rights, privileges, and obligations of private persons.