Mr. BERG. Permanent full-time staff-years of employment for SCS were 13,869 in fiscal year 1977, 14,522 in fiscal year 1972, and 15,274 in fiscal year 1967.

Mr. WHITTEN. What impact has this gradual reduction in the number of people assigned to SCS had on your program operations?

Mr. BERG. There is no question that the major impact of declining employment levels over the last fifteen years has been the gradual reduction of direct technical assistance to land users at the county level field office. We have attempted to soften this impact as much as possible by more efficiently utilizing existing staff through such management improvements as creating multi-state watershed planning units, consolidating other field offices, contracting soil survey map printing services, and other similar actions. We have also seen some productivity increases in terms of program outputs per staff-years of input. In addition, increases in state and local contributions of funds and personnel have helped to offset some of the decrease in SCS employees. However, the need to meet new administrative and legislative requirements initiated in the past several years has resulted in a redirection of staff efforts away from on-the-ground conservation work. Some of these initiatives include the preparation of various environmental and economic statements, health and safety activities, equal opportunity activities, reclamation of rural abandoned surface mines, resource appraisal, and program development under the Resources Conservation Act and the experimental Rural Clean Water Program. Mr. WHITTEN. If the Congress were to provide 500 additional people to SCS, where would they be assigned and why?

Mr. BERG. Assuming that supporting funds were also available, all of these 500 employees would be assigned to the field with most of them going to the district level offices where our programs are delivered to the public. This distribution would help to restore some of the 2,200 permanent staff-years that have been lost, primarily at the district level, over the past fifteen years as we noted earlier.

Mr. WHITTEN. What would be the highest priorities for additional staff?

Mr. BERG. There would be three high priority areas receiving these employees. One would be the Watershed Planning activity, where we would restore the proposed reduction of 85 employees in order to maintain a planning program to support a long-term viable construction program. A second high priority would be to provide additional SCS staffing for the accelerated conservation technical assistance program in targeted geographical areas. We would assign between 175 to 200 employees to these areas to address the erosion and water problems concentrated there. The remaining 215 to 240 employees would be assigned to other areas to work on high priority resource problems including erosion, water quality and supply, and others.

REVIEW OF WATERSHED PROJECT PLANS

We agreed last year in Public Law 96-528, under which we are presently operating, that Public Law 83-566 watershed projects be exempted from the requirements of Executive Orders 12113 and

12141. Has that enabled you to speed up your operations? What has been the effect of that?

Mr. BERG. Mr. Chairman, the effect of that exemption was to call the eight watershed plans that were in the Water Resources Council back to the Department and resubmit them to the OMB for transmittal to the Congress.

According to our General Counsel the law clearly has exempted these plans from the requirement for an independent review by the Water Resources Council. At the present time these projects are pending at OMB for their decision.

The 1982 appropriation language suggested that until this independent review was properly done, these projects would be held up. That matter has not yet been resolved.

Mr. WHITTEN. The Office of Management and Budget is bringing about the same degree of delay.

Mr. BERG. We have always had the Office of Management and Budget as the final stage representing the President before the plans came to the congressional committees for approval. Within the last couple of years the independent review activity came into the picture and that is where the plans were being held. The independent review was prohibited by Congress so it is presently at an impasse, except that the appropriation language exempts our particular projects from that independent review.

Mr. WHITTEN. How long has OMB held them up? Give us a list. Mr. BERG. We can provide that for the record, Mr. Chairman. Mr. WHITTEN. Let us know when they went there, how long they have been delayed, and what the outlook is.

1 These plans were called from WRC and forwarded to OMB following enactment of the Agriculture, Rural Development and Related Agencies Appropriation Act (Public Law 96-528) signed on Dec. 15, 1980.

Transmittal of the following project plans is being held pending policy decision on Executive review process: Hoyle Creek Watershed, Oklahoma; East Carroll Watershed, Louisiana; South Fork Licking River Watershed, Ohio; Calapooya Creek Watershed, Oregon.

Mr. BERG. We have no idea as to what might be the future on this. We do understand the revised budget that came forward in March will not fund the Water Resources Council.

Mr. MYERS. You can depend on that.

Mr. BERG. I think the people who represent the Assistant Secretary vel in Interior and Mr. Crowell are very familiar with the

background on this and are awaiting the opportunity in their new positions to look at the history and what should be done about it.

Mr. WHITTEN. We had a witness yesterday who pronounced "rescission" as "recession." I told him he was the first witness to pronounce it properly.

In connection with your work, has the Office of Management and Budget cited any authority to take the place of the Water Resources Council and sit on these projects? Do they give you any indication of how long they will hold them before they will let you proceed?

Mr. BERG. It was tied to an Executive Order, in fact two Executive Orders that involved our fairly small projects compared to the large projects of the Corps, the Bureau of Reclamation and so forth. We were kind of caught because of our water resource orientation in that whole process.

AUTHORIZATION OF WATERSHED PROJECTS

When our projects reach a certain size and expenditure level, they come to the committees by law for approval. Because we were part of the independent review process, this whole activity is unclear and I think we are waiting for the proper time for an analysis of what should be done.

Mr. MYERS. Mr. Chairman, would you yield?

Mr. WHITTEN. The gentleman from Indiana.

Mr. MYERS. Some of the projects used to be originated by the Committee on Agriculture, the authorization committee. We did not wait for you to come. We directed the Department as to what projects we wanted built. Have we gotten away from that where the Agriculture Committee waits for you to come to them?

Mr. BERG. Mr. Myers, your Committee was doing the proper thing but they were doing it after the projects had been submitted through the process we had working earlier. They had come through a review process within the agency, within the Department, and on to OMB for transmittal to Congress for their consideration.

Mr. MYERS. Fifteen years ago we were doing it that way?

Mr. BERG. Yes, you have been doing that since the beginning of the Act.

Mr. MYERS. I thought we had a separate subcommittee and we originally told the Department which ones to move forward on. Mr. BERG. There is no question about that. You had the complete say once the projects were here whether they should go forward or be amended or withdrawn.

Mr. MYERS. Do you not have a number of those projects which have already had the planning stage completed waiting in the pipeline?

Mr. BERG. Yes.

Mr. MYERS. The Committee on Agriculture could right now have plenty of these projects to direct you to go ahead and continue and then you would be in violation of the law if you let OMB or anyone else derail this program. You would have to come back to Congress for a deferral decision, would you not?

Mr. BERG. This gets complicated. Once the project is approved, then we move into this business as to whether we can have a new construction start. That is where-

Mr. MYERS. Excuse me for interrupting. That would be a decision Congress makes. If they direct you to go ahead and start the new start, you have one of two choices: either to offer a rescission back to Congress or a deferral. You would have to take one of those two courses. You could not just hold it.

Mr. BERG. We agree totally. Once the appropriation process has become law and it does order us to go ahead with construction starts, we do move into that setting.

The ones we are talking about that are backlogged in terms of not coming forward for approval have not yet reached the point that you could say that.

Mr. MYERS. As I understand it, the final decision really rests with Congress. The Administration, the President, Office of Management and Budget, or you would only recommend and ask for Congress to take further action. Ultimately it is going to be up to Congress to decide whether we take action on these projects.

Mr. BERG. It finally comes down to the matter of what should be done about the construction starts and the amount of funds we have available to do the work that has already been approved. Mr. MYERS. That is right. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

NEED FOR SCS

Mr. WHITTEN. The watershed program is very important, and the need for it is seen most clearly in California and all over the country where more and more land is going to concrete.

The watershed program, along with agricultural conservation, is really the basis of the need for the Soil Conservation Service. Do you see any change in the need? Does the problem get larger? Are we making progress, slipping back, or staying even as your personnel has declined?

Mr. BERG. Mr. Chairman, the valuable thing that has been happening in the last ten years, that has helped us hold the line on making good progress in terms of not being totally wiped out, is the fact that state and local governments have stepped forward with their programs that have provided technical assistance and, more recently, cost-share funds.

We have been able to continue to make excellent progress in the conservation districts with land users that want to move ahead with soil and water conservation.

We have also had some new practices that have come into better use, including our conservation tillage activities that this past year were utilized on about 60 million acres. That practice not only saves soil but it saves fuel. We are getting good results from that. There have been some innovative ideas that have developed that have helped stretch the dollar further and make the staff-years go further.

Our assessment in terms of the appraisal data we have recently collected shows we do still have some very serious soil erosion problems and some very serious sedimentation problems. The projections in our water resources area are disturbing in that flood

damage costs will continue to grow at the rate we are moving on that program.

We also have some serious problems in terms of the utilization of our irrigation water and especially our well water.

Mr. WHITTEN. We ask these questions because we have read about the problems in California, and it is frightening to see the same things happening in other parts of the country.

Could you spell out in more detail, by state, the major part of this contribution?

Mr. BERG. I will provide some tables for the record which show the nonfederal contributions of funds and services to soil and water conservation programs.

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