September 11, 1967

Senator Edmund S. Muskie
United States Senate
Washington, D.C.

Dear Senator Muskie:

This is in reply to your memorandum of August 12 concerning Senate
Resolution 68,

T have been following the newspaper accounts of the progress of your
Subcommittee with great interest. I would, in fact, be very grate-

ful if you could ask your staff to give me any convenient priority for
receiving continuous information from your Subcommittee on this subject.

=
As you might readily perceive from some of my enclosed writings, some ae
of which you may perhaps already have encountered, I share with you the &
sense of need for long range consideration by the Congress, of techno- >

logy and the human environment in the future. noe

My main question has to do with the effectiveness of a generalized, on-
going staff study which is divorced from pragmatic authority to allo-
cate resources and undertake other legislative action. The most nearly
comparable analogue in the Executive Branch is the Bureau of the Budget
and the Office of the Science Advisor, the staff the President must have
if he is to make wise decisions about resource allocation. For these
reasons 1 have favored placing the authority for the kind of study your
Subcommittee recommends as the major responsibility of the Committee

on Appropriations. Even better than that might be a fundamental re-
organization of the Senate Committee's system like that recommended

dn the final report of the Joint Committee on the Organization of the
Congress, Senate Report #1414 of the [Tighty-ninth CongressSS8€cond Session.

However, since there seem to be irremediable political obstacles towards

a fundamental rationalization of the planning functions of Congress to
match those of the Executive, your Subcommittee's proposal may have to

be regarded as the most realistic expedient to do a job that badly needs
to be done. The main function of the hearings envisaged for the new
Select Committee will, of course, be educational, an encouragement to
criticism and innovation, crucial steps in the legislative process. The
establishment of a regular annual cycle of such hearings may gradually
bring about the requisite level of public attention. In the last analysis
Senator Edmund S. Muskie
page two
September 11, 1967

the value and visibility of these hearings will depend on the quality
of the witnesses called to testify.

Even without the leverage of responsibility for appropriations the
Committee on Government operations could certainly exert a very salu-
tary pressure on the Executive Branch to demand an appropriate invest-
ment in long range planning and the exposure of these plans for the
widest public debate. If there is to be a Select Committee on Tech-
nology it is important that it establish at least a comparable degree
of authority to elicit the appropriate executive response. This in
turn will depend to a large degree on the stature of the members
appointed to such a Gommittee and on the extent to which they actually
identify themselves with its affairs and its probing.

The past two Administrations have seen a revolution in the zeal of Congress
to exert its authority for the solution of our most urgent National pro-
blems. This zeal has much of its past and future strength from the kind
of relationship between the Congress and the scientific and technological
community that your proposed new €ommittee could do a great deal to
cultivate,

Sincerely yours,

Joshua Lederberg |
Professor of Genetics
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