correlate and process data relating to social needs, and project social trends.

A number of State legislatures have legislative service agencies charged with legislative fiscal analyses and review functions. The nature and scope of the office of the legislative analyst of the California State Legislature very much parallels that of the Office of Goals and Priorities Analysis established by my amendment to S. 5.

Mr. Chairman, I wish to pay tribute to other colleagues who have developed ideas very much along this same line. Senator Nelson, a member of this very committee, has proposed the establishment of a Joint Congressional Committee on National Priorities.

Senator Proxmire has suggested the establishment of a priority staff as a part of the Joint Economic Committee, of which I have the honor to be the ranking minority member.

Senator Ribicoff has held hearings on the possible expansion of the role of the Comptroller General in exactly this area. and, in that connection. I ask unanimous consent that a letter dated February 17, 1970, from the Comptroller General commenting on my amendment be made a part of the record after the testimony of the witness. Senator MONDALE. Without objection.

Senator JAVITS. The Comptroller's letter indicates that his office would not be right for this purpose, unless vested with new authority, new personnel, and so forth. Thus, I think it is preferable to establishing the separate office which I propose.

So, again, Mr. Chairman, I thank you very much for having this hearing, and I hope we will have as a result a really landmark measure ranking with the Full Employment Act of 1946 in the new field of social responsibility.

Senator MONDALE. I thank the Senator for those most useful comments. I think the review you made of the various, disparate efforts, all seeking to achieve the same objective, is very helpful because I think it helps underscore the fact that now is the time for action.

There seems to be a consensus in the Senate that something is missing in this area. I can recall on several occasions you have authored amendments for priority setting arrangements. I think that, in every instance, I have supported that effort.

I believe if this committee can act quickly, that we may have a response from the Senate in this session. We are delighted to have Senator Percy here this morning.

STATEMENT OF HON. CHARLES PERCY, A U.S. SENATOR FROM THE STATE OF ILLINOIS

Senator PERCY. Mr. Chairman, I am delighted to be here with Mr. Barr and Mr. Zwick, two of the most gifted, creative and dedicated public servants that we have had in this country. I feel very privileged, indeed, to have had a chance to exchange ideas with them in the past.

I think it is also very important that these hearings are being held today, the day after the President has sent to the Congress a message creating a domestic council patterned after the National Security Council, to deal with priorities and needs in the domestic economy, and that the Bureau of the Budget is being recast, in a sense, and being renamed

the Office of Management and Budget, with a new responsibility. I hope that the Bureau of the Budget will not have diminution of responsibility or authority, but a strengthening of its function and purpose.

We have to continue to marvel at the wisdom of our Founding Fathers. They set up a basic structure of government that has yet to be equalled which has the basic elements necessary to insure the rights of the individual, the protection of our society, and the means for rational change. The foundation for this mechanism is our three coequal branches of government: the legislative, the executive, and the judicial.

History and scholars have long recognized that the legislative branch is the primus. It is the branch closet to the people through the frequent elective process and, therefore, by its very nature must be more readily responsible to the people. It is, therefore, with great concern that I review recent trends which indicate a diminution of power in this branch.

I am not sure whether the committee members will agree with me, but I will make a categorical statement based on my own experience in the Congress, which has now been three and a half years.

In my judgment, no 535 men and women in history have ever been vested with greater responsibility and authority for solving more complex problems, with fewer tools of management and under more chaotic and confusing organization, than the U.S. Congress.

Senator MONDALE. If I could interrupt there, I couldn't agree with you more. We are just marking up a $35 billion Elementary and Secondary Education Act, with very little analytical information at hand.

Senator PERCY. When I compare the tools that I had available to me in business to make the relatively minor decisions that I had to make, we had anything we wanted or needed. We could run data. off on computers and an adequate corps of people was available. When I compare the change now, and the magnitude of the decisions I am called on to make I am very uneasy about the fundamental information on which I am making those decisions. I think a change is needed, and that is why I welcome the opportunity to support the legislation that you have very wisely initiated, and the amendment Senator Javits has proposed.

I think the change has been brought about by many factors not the least of which is the huge growth in the executive branch coupled with a loss, even abdication, of adequate control in the appropriation process. The "power of the purse" was given to and continues to reside in Congress. It is the principal power which Congress has to check and maintain the balance between the executive and legislative branches.

We have been witnesses of an enormous growth in the Federal budget. The most recent budget request is for over $200 billion. Since Congress is not physically capable of checking on the thousands of programs and people in the executive branch the restraint must be on the money which they request appropriated and spend.

Let me make clear that these remarks should not be interpreted as questioning the integrity or capability of the executive branch as a

whole or any of its members, but rather to make the point that an imbalance does exist.

I do not question that the executive branch properly has certain responsibilities and certain views of its own that are different from the legislative branch. I do submit that a balance is required in order to provide maximum benefit to the people and insurance against use of usurpation of power by any one branch.

The imbalance becomes crystal clear when one looks at the congressional committee structure concerned with the appropriations process and what they face during the annual combat known as the budget hearings. On the Senate side we have an appropriations committee made up of 24 Members and supported by 39 staff people. On the House side their Appropriations Committee is made up of 51 Members supported by 28 staff members.

This small army, although not tattered, is frequently torn. It performs valiantly every year when they face thousands of executive branch troops who have prepared and presented the budget.

The amount of paper is another reflection of this imbalance. We in Congress collectively might generate a few thousand sheets of analysis and questions, but we all know that during the course of the hearing literally tons of paper are delivered to the Hill from the various departments of the executive branch.

We literally do not have the time to analyze it or appraise it. It just showers down upon us, without the resources on our part to take it apart and understand it and base our judgments on facts rather than just hunch judgments, or shooting from the hip.

It is painfully obvious to me that our national priorities as well as legislative executive structure are out of balance. It is equally obvious that the Congress should move without delay to become more effective in reestablishing our priorities for the coming decade.

Congress is ill-equipped now, however, to set overall priorities due to the way the legislative process is set up. Each bill and appropriation is handled separately with no real attention given as to how each piece of legislation fits into an overall framework of needs and resources available.

Congress needs better tools to evaluate programs in order to help redesign our social institutions to make them more responsive to the needs of the people of this country.

This is why I feel that the amendment to S. 5 being discussed this morning, to create an Office of Goals and Priorities Analysis within the Congress would be a useful and needed step. Congress needs assistance in conducting analyses of national goals and priorities and obtaining the information necessary to make proper priority decisions. Such an office should be rigorously nonpartisan and designed to provide Congress with the most complete information and analyses possible.

I take a deep personal interest in the Congress having this capability. In January 1959 I was called to Washington to consult with President Eisenhower. He thoughtfully asked me to go over the state of the Union message. I made one suggestion, that he make the suggestion that there be created a Commission on National Goals.

He pulled that message out and rewrote that section of it. We worked together for 8 hours that day, and so far as I can recall, it is the only

idea ever remembered in that message. We did establish for the first time the principle of looking ahead, planning ahead, and now we have instituted the practice of requiring the executive branch to program for 5 years ahead.

This idea came out of the Joint Economic Committee. Out of a council of social advisers the same hard test could be put to many programs, requiring that we look ahead to see where some of those programs are going and what the end result will be.

Without such priorities analyses available to Congress in the past, this Nation has overspent in many areas and has not devoted enough resources to many pressing social needs. A good example of this are the costs associated with our NATO defense effort. It costs the United States $14 billion annually to support our troops in NATO. At the same time, we have a food crisis in many urban areas, including the city of Chicago. We simply have inadequate sources of food in many cities to feed our own malnourished and hungry children.

Senator MONDALE. Would you yield there?

Senator PERCY. I would be happy to.

Senator MONDALE. Senator Javits serves as ranking minority member of the Labor Committee, and I believe I am correct that in 1967 some doctors went down to Mississippi on their own and sent back a shocking report, in which they said they saw more starvation there, almost, than they had seen in India.

Following that, we had hearings with the Surgeon General, the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Labor, and none of them knew anything about it. They were not to be criticized. Neither did we. Now, we know hunger is a national disgrace which mangles children.

You have served on that committee. Why is it that something as absolutely essential as a decent diet, and the absence of that necessity for millions of Americans, should remain a matter of secrecy from the U.S. Congress and from the executive branch those many years? I don't understand.

Something is awfully wrong with the way we look at and perceive and understand human problems in this country.

Senator PERCY. I think one of the advantages some of us have who have come in relatively new is to keep questioning. I hope I don't get so used to the system that I don't keep asking questions.

I keep asking the question:

Why is it necessary to still spend $14 billion annually for NATO? NATO was set up to protect Europe at the end of the war when those countries were impoverished and on their backs. There was a necessity then, but why, 25 years later, with those countries prospering and killing us in world markets, and investing all over the world, why, today, do we sit here and continue to pay $14 billion?

It is just the inertia. Once you get a program started in government, the inertia keeps it moving, and hell freezes over before you get rid of that program, no matter how much it is needed or not needed.

The President has signed a bill for $19.4 billion for education, health and welfare, and how many new programs are in there? How many innovative thoughts? He can't get $25 million to even study new ways of training children in elementary and secondary schools. Squeezed out was his $9 million for the teachers' program, but all this impacted aid was left in.

The old programs are protected by congressional feelings, I guess, in some districts. This is why we now have to have a basis for evaluating one program against another.

The ABM program is another example. What is the great danger that we are protecting ourselves against, with a minimum mini $12 billion system? How do we evaluate that? If you build a medical school for $20 million and operate it with $5 million for a year, that $12 billion would build 100 medical schools and operate them for 20 years, if my arithmetic is right.

Yet, how do we evaluate programs? What processes does Congress go through? I think that process is sloppy. There is no basis for our evaluating these needs and priorities, and we are not given the information on which to base our judgment. We are just separately_voting on one appropriation Tuesday, another one Wednesday, and another one Friday, without the relationship of one to the whole.

There is also a crisis in health care in this country. Several weeks ago Cook County Hospital, the largest in the world-I visited there weekend before last, and I will be there again this Sunday-was forced to discontinue regular admittance of patients except for critical emergency cases.

Operations were postponed, patients were discharged earlier than they would otherwise have been-all due to a lack of facilities and medical personnel available to treat the ill. We certainly have a crisis in environmental control, yet we continue to spend $14 billion a year to support 310,000 American troops in prosperous Western Europe 25 years after the end of World War II.

The Eisenhower Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence pointed out that a nation's growth or decline really comes from within. The Commission said, and I think this is one of the most profound statements that a commission has ever made, and too little attention has been paid to it:

When in man's long history other great civilizations fell, it was less often from external assault than from internal decay. Our own civilization has shown a remarkable capacity for responding to crises emerging to higher pinnacles of power and achievement. But our most serious challenges to date have been external-the kind this strong and resourceful country could unite against. While serious external dangers remain, the graver threats today are internal: haphazard urbanization, racial discrimination, disfiguring of the environment, unprecedented interdependence, the dislocation of human identity and motivation created by an affluent society-all resulting in a rising tide of individual and group violence.

The greatness and durability of most civilizations has been finally determined by how they have responded to these challenges from within. Ours will be no exception.

This country cannot undertake so many peojects in the world no matter how desirable, and do what it must at home also. Thus, the work that the Office of Goals and Priorities Analysis would undertake: 1. An analysis, in the light of national priorities, of the annual budget submitted by the President:

2. An examination of resources available to the Nation and the cost implications of alternative sets of national priorities;