Research: Bouncing Baby Bureaucracy

In Rockville, Md., one noon last week, geophysicists closed the circuits of the world’s first earthquake-information center, connecting 400 seismic reporting stations throughout the world. In Oyster Bay, L.I., oceanographers launched a new wire-drag ship to hunt for undersea hazards, joining a fleet of 14 research vessels already commissioned. Throughout the week, weather satellites scanned the atmosphere for hurricanes, while “Project Stormfury’s” planes stood ready to try diverting any budding tropical storm. All these related functions—and many more—are now controlled and operated by the Environmental Science Services Administration (ESSA), the bounciest baby bureaucracy in Big Government Science.

A bare 13 months old and growing fast, ESSA has united the Weather Bureau, Coast & Geodetic Survey and the Bureau of Standards’ Central Radio Propagation Laboratory, creating a 10,000-man agency under the Department of Commerce. As envisioned by President Johnson, it is to “provide a single national focus for our efforts to describe, understand and predict the state of the oceans, the state of the lower and upper atmosphere, and the size and shape of the earth.”

The hope is that coordinated effort will lead to more efficient collection and dissemination of environmental phenomena—and far better understanding. ESSA’s immediate goals include daily forecasting as well as faster warnings for tornadoes, seismic sea waves (tsunamis), floods, earthquakes and other natural disasters. The ultimate goal is to control this environment.

As dervish-like as the environment he has set out to control, ESSA’s first administrator, Dr. Robert M. White, 43 (younger brother of Author Theodore), combines the talents of a no-nonsense executive with solid scientific vision. White comes to the job with a background in weather research, first with the Air Force, then as president of Travelers Research Center, Inc., and later as chief of the U.S. Weather Bureau. Most observers consider him superbly equipped to chart the new agency’s $145 million budget, 14% of which is earmarked for both in-house and contracted research.

The budget is sure to sprout quickly. Recently, the President’s Science Advisory Committee recommended combining the oceanographic functions of ESSA with those of the Geological Survey, Bureau of Commercial Fisheries, Bureau of Mines, and even the Coast Guard. Although the report stopped short of directly fingering ESSA to head this research, the logical conclusion is that ESSA may soon become the earth-bound parallel of space-bound NASA.