Secretary UDALL. My own personal time. I stuck my neck out on it, I would reassure the Senator or reassert that statement. My judgment, Senator, is that in order to get the type of momentum that is needed, in order to establish these new patterns of cooperation that are implicit in the new legislation that has been sent up, you are not really going to get the type of momentum needed unless some Secretary, whether it is Secretary Gardner or myself, spends that quantity of time himself personally. You have no way of keeping a stopwatch on me, but I can assure you during the last month or 6 weeks I have spent 25 percent of my time, including our trip in Germany, on pollution problems.

Mr. SEIDMAN. Senator Muskie, could I make a comment on your question on timing?

Senator MUSKIE. Yes.

Mr. SEIDMAN. It is always a good question as to the best time to send a reorganization forward. I think it has been our experience that when you have a new program which is in the stage of organization and development, it is a much better time to move forward than when it becomes well entrenched and established and then you have to pull it out by the roots as it were.

At that time it is much more difficult to accomplish this kind of reorganization. Since this new program is in the process of development, and in the transitional stage in any event, I think it is much more desirable to move forward with a reorganization at this time, rather than a later time when it would be much more difficult.

Senator MUSKIE. I disagree for a couple of reasons. First of all you have got this transfer of personnel problem. If the program stayed in HEW you were going to lose some people who preferred to stay in the Public Health Service. It seems to me, and this is only an observation rather than any statistical judgment, that the move to Interior may create doubts in even more PHS personnel. You might lose more than you would have if you stayed in HEW.

The second point that I would make, and I am using Secretary Udall's argument now, is that all we are doing is transferring the new Federal Water Pollution Control Administration bodily from HEW to Interior. If you were to wait to do it 5 years from now, by that time you would have a more vigorous child.

You would have one that had had a few years to develop and grow and establish policies and get settled. So I don't think that the uprooting then would be as likely to kill the tree as it might now.

Mr. SEIDMAN. I think the roots would be deeper in HEW as far as the Public Health Service personnel who would be transferred are concerned. I think their judgment would be one as to whether they are going to leave the Public Health Service.

If they make that decision and their dedication is to the water pollution control program, it makes relatively little difference to them whether the program is administered by Interior or HEW. The basic decision they face is whether they should leave the Public Health Service.

The other point, Senator Muskie, you raised related to other programs, and of course these were not brought together under the Water Quality Act. But the reorganization plan does transfer to the Secretary of the Interior the present authorities of the Secretary of HEW,

with respect to the HUD program and with respect to the program in the Department of Commerce under the Economic Development Act as well as the Appalachia program.

So you again have the same relationship which exists today between HEW and the HUD program and the commerce program and the agricultural program, the Appalachian program, so this is unchanged except the authority goes to the Secretary of the Interior.

Senator MUSKIE. That new sewer systems program of the Housing Act of last year stays in HUD.

Mr. SEIDMAN. That is correct, but the responsibilities of the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare with respect to evaluating projects with respect to the extent that there are satisfactory arrange

ments

Senator MUSKIE. The purpose as stated in the President's message is that one agency should assume leadership in our clean water effort. You have overlooked the opportunity to give that one agency additional functions that are certainly important. For example, that sewer program, and I had something to do with writing that one into the Housing Act, is available to towns, provided that they have a sewage treatment plant. Now the sewage treatment program is going to be in Interior, and yet the sewer systems programs, which are tied to it, are going to be left in HUD and Agriculture.

In addition you have in HUD the program to eliminate the septic tank communities in this country, and that is very important to underground waters which are of concern to Interior. All of these are part of the tools, the carrots, if you will, the assistance that the Federal Government can make available to towns and communities all over the country to make it possible for them to clean up their waters. Yet you are leaving two of them out.

Why?

Mr. SEIDMAN. An appropriate role is kept for Interior in these programs. I think again here the judgment

Senator MUSKIE. I know but moving away from the appropriate role concept, we are going to consolidate.

Mr. SEIDMAN. Because water and sewer facilities go beyond just pollution abatement. This is our problem. Water and sewer facilities are critical to urban development.

Senator MUSKIE. That is true of sewage treatment plants.

Mr. SEIDMAN. Yes, and you do have the grants for sewage treatment plants.

Senator MUSKIE. Why didn't you transfer those to HUD?

Mr. SEIDMAN. As I say, these are problems of government which are so complex that a decision depends on where you want to put a particular emphasis.

I don't think we can ever organize so we have all things related to any given function in one agency, without by doing that creating chaos and complete overlapping and duplication throughout the executive branch structure.

Senator MUSKIE. Again that is why I would like to get down into some of the details of the plan if I may. The plan involves the establishment of a new Assistant Secretary in the Department of the Interior. Will the water pollution control program come under that Secretary rather than under the Assistant Secretary now in the Department who has jurisdiction over water?

Secretary UDALL. Senator, at the present time in my Department, I have four program Assistant Secretaries, and each one of them has water responsibilities. I do have one secretary, called the Assistant Secretary for Water and Power, that supervises the Bureau of Reclamation and the power marketing agencies of the Department, Bonneville Power.

Senator MUSKIE. That is Secretary Hollum?

Secretary UDALL. That is Secretary Hollum. Under this reorganization plan, Congress having said that it wants the water pollution control administration program to have an Assistant Secretary who does nothing but supervise the water pollution control program, this new Assistant Secretary would, under the way we operate in my Department, where assistant secretaries are line officers who supervise a particular area, this program would have a single Assistant Secretary, and water and power under its present organization, would be kept as it is.

I think it would be a big mistake to even consider an overlap of responsibilities with regard to that.

Mr. SEIDMAN. Again, Senator Muskie, this is specifically provided for in the reorganization plan which says:

There shall be in the Department of the Interior one additional Assistant Secretary of the Interior, who shall assist the Secretary in the discharge of the functions transferred to him hereunder.

Senator MUSKIE. That does not indicate, and this is what I wanted to clarify, whether or not there would be brought under this Assistant Secretary in addition to water pollution, the functions of the present Assistant Secretary for Water and Power. I think that should be clarified.

Secretary UDALL. I think the two should be divorced and I certainly want to go on the record on that very firmly today, Senator. Senator MUSKIE. So the new Assistant Secretary will have only this function, supervising the water pollution control program?

Secretary UDALL. Yes. We might want to consider, and I think I should be candid with the committee on that point, because from time to time the Department considers internal reorganizations, allocating functions back and forth between secretaries. There are two programs that go right to the heart of the water quality program and the quality research program. One is the saline water program.

The objective in the saline water program is to take minerals and salts out of water, primarily brackish water or saline water. The research with regard to water pollution is to take mineral salts and solids out of water. I think terms of eliminating overlapping research, of coordinating it, it might be that these two might very well go under this one assistant secretary.

Senator MUSKIE. I would think that might be wise.

Secretary UDALL. Secretary Hollum right now supervises saline water as another responsibility. I think it would belong more over here than there, but I have made no decision on this. I think that the problem is what is the best action focus. How can you get everyone under one assistant secretary so that he is supervising on a dayto-day basis and moving forward as rapidly as possible.

Senator MUSKIE. But reclamation would be kept under Secretary Hollum?

Secretary UDALL. Yes. This is a construction program, and I think this should be divorced by all means from water pollution. Senator MUSKIE. The Bureau of Mines, who has that? Secretary UDALL. The Bureau of Mines is another Assistant Secretary, and it has water functions such as the mine drainage problem. Senator MUSKIE. Who is going to be the new Assistant Secretary? Secretary UDALL. Senator, I have not even heard that problem discussed. In fact I don't think I am the one who could even presume to discuss the question until the reorganization plan is decided, and I am sure none of us here at the table has discussed it.

Senator MUSKIE. This reorganization program is based in part upon the river-basin approach to our water problems including pollution. The river basin approach of course underlay the water quality standards legislation of last year, and it is also a part of the President's clean river legislation on which we will have hearings later this month. Would you say that the river basin approach is a key to your case for transferring this program out of HEW to Interior?

Secretary UDALL. Senator, in my judgment this goes right to the heart of the matter, because I think the Congress and the legislation witten last year has been moving toward the river-basin approach of cleaning up rivers, indeed of taking water as a resource, and dealing with it on a watershed basis. People who share it as a common resource should have a common approach to it, and have common standards and common enforcement practices on a river. Therefore since my own Department, not alone in the West, because under the legislation last year I am now Chairman of the Federal Water Resources Council, my Department does have very significant contact with urban areas today on this problem. I head the Potomac study at the President's order, which has been a very good field exercise in terms of planning the whole range of water. I also sit on the Delaware River Commission.

I was sent into the cities of the Northeast as Chairman of the Federal Water Resources Council last August in the drought situation. I am working with the metropolitan water district in southern California, which is the largest water wholesaler in the world, on a large saline waterplant, and many of the water supply programs of the Bureau of Reclamation in the West are concerned in relationships with cities.

sense,

99 10 TOIL

I did want to make the point that particularly in a quickening way in the last 2 or 3 years, through the Potomac, the Delaware, the Federal Water Resources Council, my Department has had increasingly broad responsibilities, and I think this is one of the reasons the President noticed this and said "Well why shouldn't we put it all there." Senator MUSKIE. I think we have got to be very careful about how we use and implement the river-basin concept. I think and this of course is in the legislation of last year, that when you consider water quality standards you have got to cover the Liverpoo the basin as a whole because you have got to consider your. water supply and the rate at which it flows and the demands made on it in other sections of the river basin before you can decide what can be done abolit, water quality in any particular part of it. But at the same time there are communities with water pollution problems which are not on the river basins. I can think of two in New England, Boston, and Portland

in my own State and there are communities that have very difficult water problems that are not on a river basin.

They have to be dealt with and they have to be helped. I was interested, Mr. Secretary, in the organization of the water resource programs in the Ruhr Valley of Germany. There they have separated the two functions of water supply and water quality which you are combining. As you will recall, they established one association to deal with water supply, building reservoirs to control the flow and so on, which is very much a part, of course, of their capability for dealing with water quality. The water quality association is separate.

I think we have to bear in mind that, although we have to think in terms of the river basin in order to establish water quality standards, that when we come to actually implementing those standards and cleaning up the stream, we have got to deal with political institutions, which fragment the river basin along State lines, county lines, and municipal lines. This frankly is one place where I have reservations about Interior. You don't deal with urban metropolitan America in this sense, or you haven't in the past. You have got to create an organization for this purpose, have you not?

Secretary UDALL. Yes; and, of course, to the extent the transfer takes place, the very people in HEW, in the water pollution field, who already have these contracts, hopefully the great bulk of them, will come over. But Senator, I think that we have a growing edge in this whole new program. I think there is a whole new pattern of relationships that are being developed, and I think we are faced later this month with some very acute questions that we will want to discuss with your committee with regard to how the new legislation should be written.

Senator GRUENING. Secretary Gardner has a commitment and has to leave shortly. He has a two-page statement. I wonder whether we could hear Secretary Gardner now and then, of course, we will conclude tomorrow. I don't want to foreclose you.

Secretary GARDNER. I would be perfectly willing just to have this read in the record.

Senator GRUENING. I think it is desirable that you make it. Secretary GARDNER. If you would like me to read it, fine. Senator GRUENING. I think your testimony is very important. Senator MUSKIE. Have we covered much of it already, Mr. Secretary?

Secretary GARDNER. A good bit of it; yes, sir.

Senator GRUENING. I think we should hear it.

Secretary GARDNER. Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, I appreciate this opportunity to testify in support of the President's Reorganization Plan No. 2 of 1966, which provides for the reorganization of certain water pollution control functions.

First, let me summarize the plan briefly and then tell you why I believe it is needed.

The plan provides for the transfer of authority under the Water Polution Control Act from the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare to the Secretary of Interior. Also transferred to the Secretary of Interior are certain functions under the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1965, the Appalachian Regional Development Act