$2.4 billion for 1971 and on a $3,000 basis they would total about $3.2 billion in 1972. I can think of nothing that would help as much to give hope and enthusiasm to the hundreds of thousands of teachers and school boards who are struggling to improve the education of our young people as your action to substantially increase the ESEA funds for 1971 and 1972. Even if you found that you couldn't go as high in the bill as I have recommended but could include in your committee report a statement of your general intent, it would be most constructive. I need not tell you that teachers, principals and administrators in your schools are having a difficult time. Millage increases for schools have been turned down more frequently in the last 2 years than at any time in the past. You know this as well as I do. You could help at this critical time to support the schools and teachers by indicating your intent to appropriate more in 1971 and 1972 than in 1970. You would not be affecting the 1970 budget and you woud be indicating your faith in the Congress' ability to improve the situation in the next 2 years. I also recommend that you include in this year's bill advance funding of higher education programs for 1971. This would be very helpful to better planning and I think that you would get "more bang out of a buck" if you provided for advance funding. Full funding of title I would involve about $3.2 billion by 1971. Along with the other titles of ESEA the appropriation of the full authorization under all titles could exceed $4 billion annually. I am reasonably sure that within a few years the Congress will appropriate this amount. I urge you very strongly to indicate in your committee report that you intend to hold hearings at an appropriate time on what the effect on our American education system would be if and when the full amount authorized under the ESEA were appropriated and that you would like a report from the Department on this matter including information from the States and school districts on the potential use of such funds. You might also ask the Federal agency to establish a special outside committee of distinguished citizens to evaluate this information and transmit their evaluation to you. If, as I believe, sooner or later you are going to appropriate the full authorization because the localities cannot meet their part of elementary and secondary education because of the failure of these millage increases, then I think you ought to start getting the kind of information you need for the next 2 or 3 appropriation years to determine how much you want to appropriate, because you can't get it in the year that you are going to ask for it. You have to really start a year ahead of time. If you started right now, it would be tough to have the information you wanted for next year. I strongly support the request made by President Nixon for experimental schools. This is a very important proposal. I believe, however, the request could be reduced from $25 to $2.5 million by making the first year a planning grant program. One hundred projects could be financed at $25,000 each at a total cost of $2.5 million. The other $22.5 million could be shifted to ESEA to meet the additional costs I have recommended. By starting with planning grants first a more satisfactory long-range program can be developed. I think it is very unfortunate that President Nixon has requested elimination of the entire request by President Johnson for construction of undergraduate and graduate facilities-a total of $107 million. While I fully support the Johnson request, I hope that as a minimum you will include at least $41 million, the amount contained in the 1969 budget. I fully support the $1,080,000 which Secretary Finch has proposed to expand assistance to community colleges. We desperately need much more aid to build community colleges and I hope in other years we could do more. President Nixon requested a decrease of $28 million in the NIH budget submitted by President Johnson. The Nixon request for the research institutes in 1970 would therefore be below the 1969 level. I made a careful study of NIH programs before I left office and I concluded that they should receive an amount which would be about $118 million above the revised submittal. I support the request for an increase in research on problems of human reproduction and family planning. I urge you to include a small amount to commence operations on the Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications (omitted by Bureau of the Budget). I think if you included a very small amount in there, Dr. Cummings and Dr. Davis then could get started, at least, to go ahead. As a minimum I suggest that the NIH Institutes receive at least $50 million more than in 1969. I am very disappointed that the revised budget reduces the work incentive program by $35 million because the goal of 175,000 enrollees set for 1970 will not be reached. I urge you to encourage the Department of Labor to speed up the program. I tried to do everything I could on that before I left office. If they can get more persons in training I would hope you would indicate your receptivity to a revised estimate in the Senate. We must make every effort to offer work training to more persons on welfare who want such training. A recent study showed 70 percent of the mothers on welfare wanted such an opportunity on a voluntary basis. There is plenty of opportunity to get some of these people back to work and off the welfare rolls, but we are not doing enough in the program either on money or emphasis to encourage the State agencies and labor departments to go ahead on this. When you are dealing with people with a fourth- or fifth- or sixthgrade education and have been on the welfare rolls a long time and only have marginal skills, I will say this: If your success rate is 50 percent, you still will save money. Don't compare this with the MDTA in terms of success rates. These are in many cases women. I can give you cases of women who had one or two illegitimate children when they were 15 or 16 years old. They left school in the sixth or seventh grade. They have been out of the labor market. They are living in communities where there is only the most menial, low-paid work and if they have four or five or six children, and it is difficult to get a job that gets them off the welfare rolls. But I still think from everything I have seen, if you had a 50-percent success rate, you would not only save money, but I think you would help human beings become more independent and self-reliant. All I can say is, if it doesn't turn out to be successful on a cost-benefit basis, then I think we just have to look at it in terms of subsidizing people who work. I have thought a great deal about that. You will remember last year you asked for that study on the manpower development. Such a report was made to your committee. At some point when the Finance Committee and the Ways and Means Committee is again reexamining the legislative base, I think you should consider proposals for some type of subsidized work program for marginal people who don't have the ability to really earn a minimum wage. Mr. MICHEL. But still with enough incentive to do something? Mr. COHEN. Right. I think if a person is willing to work—and the evidence seems that more of them are willing to work than have opportunities-you are going to have to put more money in the program. That is really what Mr. Mills on the Ways and Means Committee decided when he wrote the WIN program into law. He said he was willing to spend more money on providing day care centers, to put the children into the day care centers so the mother could get training, if even for several years it didn't result in a single penny reduction in welfare, and I agree with him. I think that is one way of overcoming the cultural disadvantage of the young child and giving the mother an opportunity to work and perform and have a sense of achievement and motivation. I also regret the cut of $64.3 million in vocational rehabilitation. I do not know the reduction in the number of persons who would be rehabilitated by this cut. I urge you to evaluate the cost-benefit effects before making a decision on this item. You might wish to restore some of the cut. I do this because, as you have always said, every person you rehabilitate turns much more back in the taxes. This can seriously reduce the number of people who have to be rehabilitated. I think it has the highest cost-benefit of almost any program. I support the $5 million added for innovative approaches on income maintenance. In the next 5 years I think we are going to make definite changes in our income maintenance programs and you really need more information on which way to go. I support the requests made by President Nixon for civil rights assistance to school districts, $6 million; nutrition, $4 million; and aid to medical schools, $5 million. I do not favor his eliminaton of Federal payments for mentally ill patients in State and local institutions after 120 days under medicaid without further discussion with the States as to how to handle this problem without adverse impact on the mentally ill. Nor do I favor the reduction of about $9 to $10 million in mental health activities. That item is estimated at $126 million in the budget and I could not believe it when I read that in the budget, that that was a correct estimate of that proposal. If it is, I am appalled and it even underscores my point that that would really mean pouring $126 million more on the States. I still don't know whether that estimate is correct. The first thing I think I'd ask you to do is to reexamine that estimate. There are requirements in the law for the States to reexamine people who are mentally ill, but with the State budgets already fixed if you were to deduct this $126 million immediately, I just, in my own heart, don't know what the effect would be on these mentally ill people. I don't know where the States would get the money. I don't know whether they would kick them out. I just don't know whether they would make the families take them. There is just nothing in the material that I have that gives me enough idea of what is going to happen to them and I ask you to reexamine it. Mr. MICHEL. Our State mental health people from Illinois were out to see me yesterday on that very subject. While we didn't have the time to go into it sufficiently to find out what the alternatives might be, in our home State Mr. COHEN. There are a lot of provisions that were written in the 1967 amendments on how you handle the mentally ill. I think they are very excellent provisions. If the States are not abiding by them, they should, because I think there are a lot of people in mental hospitals who don't need to be in mental hospitals. The community mental health centers which you supported are an attempt to get them out of institutions and back in the diagnostic and outpatient care. I think a lot more of that can be done. But I don't think you can do it that fast. You have to bring the States into the planning of it. I think this will play havoc with the States in their treatment of the mentally ill. There may be a plan that I haven't seen, but I know the States are quite upset about it. I don't favor the reduction of $10,712,000 in certain of the mental health activities-I guess it comes mostly in NIMH-even though there is a $1,379,000 increase in direct operations for mental health. I don't know what the $1,370,000 is intended to do in the budget, but I think it is very unfortunate to cut that $10 million including some cutback in the community mental health centers when this is one of the highest cost-benefit programs that you have got in the whole department. I would really like you to put in the record what I think is one of the-here is the whole plan that I developed with our people on what would happen on mental health. You can see that line-indicatingup until 1956 it was the growth of people in mental hospitals, and what would have happened if, by population growth, it would continue. Here is what is happening now. If you continue to fund the community mental health program, the plan is by 1976 to get down to 76,000 instead of the 859,000 that would have been in State mental hospitals. If you are interested in shared revenue with the States, the best thing you can do is to improve the mental health program and take this mental health cost off the States, which is what you are doing. I consider this one of the most significant programs to help not only the financing of the States and localities which now bear this almost exclusively, but to do more for, you know, mentally ill people and their families. That, to me, is a very, very important part. Mr. FLOOD. We have been discussing this at some length. It would be interesting to have this in the record. (The charts follow:) |