BUDGET REDUCTIONS: An administrative challenge

Abstract

A common challenge for those managing agricultural research is to increase research productivity despite declining resources. These are strange times in many ways. Regional differences in terms of money available for appropriations have intervened in the budgeting process in many state legislatures. There is an almost infinite list of alternatives on each legislator's desk in which to invest each increase in available allocations, depending on the primary source of resources.
The Agricultural Research community has had some success, in recent years, in convincing the Office of Program and Budget and the Congressional Appropriations Committees that the Agricultural Research Investments figures show a greater benefit-cost ratio than any of the those derived from the federal government budget. I believe that the activity conducted by the staff of the Interregional Research Project 6 (IR-6) and the agricultural knowledge involved in Agricultural Research and Development, has been decisive in the decision of the Secretary of Agriculture, John Block, to request a significant increase in allocations for fiscal year 1982. It is to be expected that the close working relationship between the United States Department of Agriculture and the state agricultural experiment stations, through the Committee on Experiment Station Policy and the Land Development Association, along with the support of the majority of our legislators in the Agricultural and Appropriations Committees of both Houses of Representatives and Senators, results in an increase in investment for agricultural research. However, at the same time many states, depending on their primary source of income, have been or are facing the use of very reduced budgets, caused by tax reductions.