States, and regions. Thus, State technical services will differ in their content and methodology from place to place. We look forward to greater experience in this effort through continued association with the national program.

We are most appreciative of this opportunity, Senator Nelson, to represent State technical services before the Subcommittee on Utilization of Scientific Manpower. We should like to offer our further experiences to you from time to time in the form of reports, bulletins, and newsletters as they come out from our office.

Thank you.

Senator NELSON. Thank you very much, Mr. Grogan, for your very fine testimony.

Have you found that in the implementation of the State Technical Services Act that the State governments, in fact, do have adequately prepared personnel to effectively and creatively administer the act?

Mr. GROGAN. I think the personnel associated with the program are quite good, Mr. Chairman. We are a small program and we have not made great demands upon the personnel resources of the States at this time. I see it as a problem in the future, not only personnel in the State organizations, but more particularly in the university organizations who are oriented philosophically toward the type of enterprise in which we are engaged.

Senator NELSON. What was the effective date of that act?

Mr. GROGAN. September 14, 1965, the office was created mid-November 1965, and

Senator NELSON. You really have not had a full year operation, insofar as the States are concerned?

Mr. GROGAN. Indeed not. The 600 activities which we funded in fiscal 1966 are in progress right now. I daresay no more than one-third of those activities have been performed and the others are being carried forth at the present time. We are in the process of approving programs based on the fiscal 1967 appropriation, there will be some lapse in time on these programs.

Senator NELSON. When will you have prepared your first report to the Congress on the performance under the act?

Mr. GROGAN. We will submit within the week our first annual report; it states what transpired through June 30, 1966. This has very little information on the performance, the use rate, the evaluation, the impact. We are expected to be evaluated by an independent committee within the 3-year authorization of the act. If this evaluation is to effective in our immediate future beyond the 3-year authorization of the act, I should think the evaluation would be performed within the next 12 months.

Senator NELSON. Who will make that?

Mr. GROGRAN. There will be a private committee set up by the Department of Commerce.

Senator NELSON. Of private citizens?

Mr. GROGAN. Yes; persons associated in no way with the program, in the administration at the Federal, State, or institutional level. Senator NELSON. Thank you very much for appearing here today and presenting your fine testimony.

Would you care to add anything, Mr. Robbins?

Mr. ROBBINS. I wanted to make one comment concerning your question about the availability of resources of the States. From our experience I do not believe that the resources are lacking but that, depending on the State, adequate resources can only be brought to bear on our problems by certain people.

In other words, I do not believe that the full resources of all the States were available to work on many of our problems. This is partially due to the nature of the university, we believe, that we could not bring out the best of talents in some of the States. It is an interesting facet that Dr. Kimball's organization, Midwest Research Institute, for example, did the planning for a number of States. The States themselves did not feel they were qualified to do it and they called his organization in to do it for them.

Senator NELSON. Thank you very much.

That will conclude the hearings until tomorrow morning at 9 o'clock. (Whereupon, the subcommittee recessed at 11:50 a.m., to reconvene at 9 a.m., Friday, January 27, 1967.)

SCIENTIFIC MANPOWER UTILIZATION, 1967

FRIDAY, JANUARY 27, 1967

U.S. SENATE,

SPECIAL SUBCOMMITTEE ON SCIENTIFIC MANPOWER UTILIZATION OF THE COMMITTEE ON LABOR AND PUBLIC WELFARE, Washington, D.C. The special subcommittee met at 9:05 a.m., pursuant to recess, in room 4232, Senate Office Building, Senator Gaylord Nelson (chairman of the special subcommittee) presiding.

Present: Senator Nelson (presiding).

Committee staff members present: Stewart E. McClure, chief clerk, and William Spring, special counsel to the subcommittee.

Senator NELSON. We will now resume hearings on S. 430, Scientific Manpower Utilization Act of 1967, and S. 467, National Commission on Public Management.

Our first witness is Mr. Henry Rowen, president of the Rand Corp., Santa Monica, Calif.

We are pleased to have you here with us, Mr. Rowen, and we appreciate your taking time to come before us.

The last time you were here you were with the Bureau of the Budget.

Mr. ROWEN. That is correct.

Senator NELSON. Proceed, please.

STATEMENT OF HENRY ROWEN, PRESIDENT, RAND CORP., SANTA MONICA, CALIF.

Mr. ROWEN. Thank you, Senator.

It is a pleasure for me to be here today to discuss the "systems" approach to problems of public policy. The "systems approach" is being increasingly discussed and it may serve a useful purpose to analyze the essential features of this method and its applicability to our domestic problems.

In some ways there is a good deal more talk about this application than there is practice, and some of the reasons why there is more talk than action will be worth going into.

There is considerable evidence, for the utility of the systems method. What is this method? In broad concept, it is quite simple. It implies taking into account all the factors that are relevant to a subject under study. Stated in this form, it sounds commonsensical, trite, but also, if taken literally, impossible to do in practice. Impossible, because everything in the world is connected in some way with everything else. But no finite amount of analysis can take account of everything

and whenever one draws a boundary, beyond which factors are to be ignored, there will be some influences, possibly important, left out.

Given this fact, we can eliminate at the outset one interpretation of the systems approach: that it is a method of understanding "everything" about, or even "everything important" about a given subject. That claim is misconceived.

One can learn a great deal about a subject, such as ballistic missile defense, child health, urban transportation, or population control, and be quite confident that some relevant, possibly very important, variables or data have been undiscovered, or neglected, or misinterpreted, or not given sufficient weight.

This being so, let's approach this subject from a different direction. Are there clearly important factors often not taken into account, or inadequately so, in the making of public policy decisions?

I think there is no question that this is the case. Just to mention a few examples:

The Federal Government spends about $1 billion a year on aviation, most of which is devoted to moving passengers from one airport to another as efficiently and safely as possible. But little effort is devoted to getting these passengers to and from airports-an increasingly important segment of the entire trip.

In the health field, Government spends a great deal on medical research to improve the health of the Nation. The budget which came out the other day shows a budget for biomedical research in the National Institutes of Health of about $1.3 billion, if I recall correctly. Of that total, my recollection is that something like one-tenth of 1 percent of the grand total is being devoted to improve the efficiency of delivery of services to the population as distinct from medical research, per se, for example, the search for a cure for cancer. A pretty small proportion.

Relatively little effort has been put forward to improve the performance of the system for delivering health care. Meanwhile, the health of this Nation, measured by various indices such as infant mortality, is relatively falling behind that of other developed countries.

To use another example, in urban transportation, our mass transportation and highway programs are managed as independent systems, despite the evident interaction among these two modes.

Now I think that most people would agree that decisions in areas in which interactions are strong should take account of these interactions. Doing this would be quite an advance, in many areas, but is this all there is to systems analysis? In my view, there is much

more.

Perhaps the most useful, brief way to think about or to describe systems analysis is to regard it as a way of making discoveries. Discoveries not of things so much, but about objectives or values, or relationships, or facts. How does one go about doing this? There are several ways:

One way is to be as clear as one can be about objectives; that is, to try to be clear about criteria. If there is a valid generalization about a good systems analysis, it is that the analyst probably will help a great deal to clarify what the issues are, what various purposes are or might be served by the activity in question.