Last year, this subcommittee was able to do a most excellent job in reporting an annual supply bill for the Department of the Interior to the House with a reduction of more than $9,000,000 below budget estimates and, as I recall, more than $26,000,000 below what the Department of the Interior had in the previous fiscal year.

Possibly members of this committee will also recall that a year ago I took the liberty of making the suggestion, as chairman of this subcommittee, that members fight out their differences of opinion around this table during the hearings, and when we meet in executive session to pass on the bill, that we express ourselves freely and fight for or against any item in this bill according to our convictions; but that, after the committee has acted, we go on the floor of the House united and stand as one man for the bill as reported by the committee. We did that a year ago and despite the onslaughts made against us by high-powered officials in the departments and agencies our bill was passed by the House in record time, and members of this committee received the warm commendation of the leaders of both political parties in the House as well as enthusiastic support from the country. Let us do a better job, if possible, this year.

The Secretary of the Interior, Hon. Harold Ickes, is present and, as is our custom, will be the first witness. The committee, as always, Mr. Secretary, will be glad to hear you at this time.

STATEMENT OF HON. HAROLD L. ICKES, SECRETARY OF THE

INTERIOR

Secretary ICKES. Mr. Chairman, and members of the committee, for the twelfth time, I am appearing before your committee in support of the appropriation requests for the Department of the Interior.

I note that there are two new members of the subcommittee this year, Congressman Rooney and Congressman Dworshak. I hope that the new members of the committee, as well as the older members, can find sufficient time to make a personal inspection of the operations conducted by the Department. If you are able to arrange an inspection trip next summer for this purpose, officials of the Department will be very happy to help prepare a schedule so that you may see a good cross-section of our activities.

APPROPRIATIONS REQUESTED FOR 1946

For the fiscal year 1946, the Department is requesting annual appropriations totaling $133,331,047, exclusive of amounts for the Solid Fuels Administration for War and the War Relocation Authority. Of this amount, $88,503,297 are for the operating, maintenance, and administrative functions of the Department, and $44,827,750 are for construction projects. Compared with the amounts appropriated for the same purposes for the current fiscal year, we are asking for increases aggregating $29,113,785, consisting of $8,670,485 for operating, maintenance, and administrative functions, and $20,443,300 for construction. Excluding overtime provided in the 1945 act, the net increases amount to a total of $38,380,331.87, made up of $16,409,573.87 for operating, maintenance, and administrative costs, and $21,970,758 for construction. There are additional amounts proposed which include such

essential activities as topographic mapping, water resources investigations, the manufacture of synthetic liquid fuels, Alaskan development, the reorganization of the Grazing Service, the preparation of plans and surveys for the conduct of deferred work, and similar items. Other major increases for 1946 are in the field of construction wherein increases of slightly more than $20,000,000 are proposed.

INCREASE IN REVENUES

I am happy to report that the estimates of revenues which we presented to your committee last year were too conservative. We anticipated revenues for 1944 at slightly over $60,000,000, whereas our actual income amounted to a total of $67,827,122. We anticipated that our revenues for 1945 would be $66,642,075, whereas our revised estimates total $69,165,350. Our preliminary figures covering revenues for 1946 represent a total of $74,552,885. Exclusive of appropriations proposed for construction, the estimates of revenue for 1946 compare favorably with the amount requested to cover operations, maintenance and administration.

ESTIMATES BASED ON GLOBAL WAR

The appropriations proposed for the Department assume the continuation of a global war throughout the fiscal year. We regard them as being justified upon three primary grounds, namely: (1) The development or continuation of activities essential to the prosecution of the war; (2) the maintenance of essential civilian services; and (3) the preparation of plans and surveys for the future conduct of deferred activities.

EFFECT OF WAR UPON MINERAL RESOURCES

This war is teaching us many lessons which we must not ignore in planning future activities. It has demonstrated our need for adequate information concerning all of our mineral resources. We need to discover and to appraise our mineral resources. We will be required, after this war, to make important decisions concerning the extent to which our mineral supplies will meet our needs for a period of years; the degree within which foreign sources should be utilized; and the amount which we should maintain in reserves of strategic minerals. The programs of this Department dealing with the discovery and recovery of strategic minerals should be considered in the light of this country's need for the development of a long-term mineral resources policy.

This war caught us with most inadequate knowledge of our topography and our water resources. As a result, millions of dollars have been expended under emergency conditions to obtain information essential to the location and construction of military reservations and war production facilities. Many of these facilities have been improperly located or poorly constructed because of deficient information on topography or water resources. There is no means of accurately measuring the total losses which have resulted from planning structures and facilities without proper knowledge as to terrain or the surface and ground water available to serve such facilities, but it is

war

certain that it represents many times the amount of money which would have been involved in obtaining and maintaining the topographic and water resources data which are essential to sound engineering planning. Therefore, we should recognize from our experiences that we require a sound continuing policy covering topographic mapping and water resources investigations which will supply us with the facts. The appropriation requests for the Geological Survey include substantial increases for topographic mapping and for water resources investigations.

PLANS AND SURVEYS FOR DEFENSE WORK

The appropriation requests for a number of the bureaus and offices include funds to prepare plans and surveys to cover deferred projects and activities which it will be essential for such agencies to prosecute as soon as war conditions permit and appropriations are provided for that purpose. Such deferred projects represent activities essential to the authorized programs and activities of the bureaus and offices that do not require new legislative authority to be undertaken. The Department proposes that sufficient funds be provided during the 1946 fiscal year to allow an appraisal to be conducted of the most essential deferred work of the bureaus. Plans and surveys are essential to the resumption of the deferred work of the Department.

NEED FOR IMPROVEMENT IN TAYLOR GRAZING ACT

The appropriation request for the Grazing Service proposes a marked increase in personnel. When the Taylor Act went into effect, it was assumed that a small staff would suffice, since a large part of the local administration would be carried out by means of the advisory committees and contributed services from other Federal agencies. Experience has demonstrated that efficient management of 142,000,000 acres of public land in 59 grazing districts cannot be accomplished upon such a basis. The Grazing Service undertook the rehabilitation under orderly use of land which, for the most part, had been badly run down by over 50 years of unregulated use. An efficient job of rehabilitation and range management cannot be accomplished without increased appropriations.

REGIONALIZATION OF BUREAU OF RECLAMATION

The regionalization of the Bureau of Reclamation, discussed with your committee last year, is being completed as rapidly as orderly decentralization of activities can be effected. Better protection for the Federal investment in reclamation projects, now approaching a billion dollars, is being secured through this reorganization. Administration of the program is brought closer to the people of the 17 Western States through the location at strategic regional points of regional directors who are charged with the responsibility of conserving the water and land resources of the arid and semiarid areas.

A corollary of the regionalization is the recommendation by the Bureau of the Budget approved by the President for the consolidation into one item of all salary and expense estimates for the administration of the general offices of the Bureau.

WAR HAS DEMONSTRATED VALUE OF MULTIPLE-PURPOSE PROJECTS

The war has vindicated the policies and programs of the Department of the Interior that have been carried out through the Bureau of Reclamation in the development of multiple-purpose projects for extending irrigation, public-power production, and related water uses in the West. More than 4,000,000 acres of land served by irrigation systems produced 10,000,000 tons of food in 1944. About 14,000,000,000 kilowatt-hours of electric energy were generated at Reclamation power plants in the same year.

The gross revenues of the Bureau of Reclamation are estimated at $28,000,000 for the fiscal year 1945, and, for 1946, are expected to increase to $30,200,000. The greater part of these revenues arises from power operations at 30 Bureau plants which now have an installed capacity of nearly two and one-half million kilowatts. The actual gross revenues for the fiscal year 1944 totaled $26,500,000. These gross-revenue figures include the estimated payments by the Bonneville Power Administration for electric energy delivered to it from the Grand Coulee Dam power plant.

The Department has greatly increased the food production from irrigated land during the war, and has more than doubled the power capacity and output of the Reclamation power plants. It has completed the installation of more than a million kilowatts of power facilities approved by the War Production Board and is advancing, as rapidly as manpower and materials permit, the extension of irrigation service to more than a million additional acres of productive land which would add materially to the food supplies for the armed forces and the civilian population.

PLANS FOR RECLAMATION PROJECTS

The President has approved estimates now before your committee that would permit the Bureau to accelerate construction on projects. which the Congress has authorized. The cost of these particular projects is estimated at a billion and a quarter dollars at pre-war prices.

Field investigations and other preconstruction activities are being scheduled, as rapidly as funds will permit, for post-war construction of more than 200 irrigation, power, and multiple-purpose projects. This construction work, when authorized and funds are provided, will help to relieve the strain of the demobilization period upon the national economy. This program for the development of permanent improvements under the Bureau of Reclamation would make work at construction sites and in distant factories; it could develop familysize farms where veterans could become self-sustaining, and, in general it could serve as a stabilizing influence during the demobilization period.

PRODUCTION OF ELECTRICAL ENERGY

During the calendar year 1944, the Federal hydroelectric plants at Bonneville and Grand Coulee Dams produced 9.6 billion kilowatthours of electrical energy, equivalent to approximately 52.5 percent of the total generation by members of the Northwest Power Pool, which includes major power producers in the States of Oregon,

Washington, Idaho, Utah, and western Montana. Gross revenues of the Bonneville Power Administration from the sale of this power during the calendar year 1944 totaled $22,335,000, an increase of more than $6,000,000 or nearly 40 percent over the 1943 total.

Eighty customers were being served by the Bonneville Power Administration on December 31, 1944, comprising 19 basic manufacturing industries, 42 public agencies, 14 Federal Government establishments and 5 public utility groups. The December 1944 revenues totaled $2,064,000 from the sale of 738,000,000 kilowatt-hours. Approximately 500,000,000 pounds of aluminum were produced by plants served directly by the Bonneville Power Administration during 1944. This amounts to nearly one-third of the total aluminum production in the United States. Magnesium production was 17,000,000 pounds, or one-twentieth of the national total. In the neighborhood of one-sixth of the tonnage of all merchant ships produced in the United States were manufactured in the PortlandVancouver shipyards.

PRODUCTION OF MINERALS

Wartime requirements have drawn heavily upon our mineral resources, especially iron, copper, lead, zinc, fluorspar, aluminum, and other metals and nonmetals, as well as upon our fuels. The job of digging these materials out of the earth took the entire energy of the mining industry, and left mine management little time to proceed with development work and exploration in advance of mining. Thousands of small mine owners have worked their properties to contribute to the $8,000,000,000 avalanche of mineral raw materials that fed our steel mills, shipyards, tank factories, and aircraft plants. The Bureau of Mines and the Geological Survey have worked hand in hand with the mineral industries to determine the extent and quality of our mineable reserves of minerals. Exploration for bauxite, for example, resulted in finding a ton of usable bauxite for each ton that was extracted from the earth and shipped to alumina plants. Millions of tons of ores of iron, tungsten, antimony, mercury, lead, zinc, and of virtually all minerals except tin and high-grade chrome, have been indicated. Coincidental with this exploration program, the laboratories of the Bureau of Mines have carried on intensive investigations of methods of beneficiating our domestic ores, and have been improving metallurgical processes to meet our vast wartime requirements.

SYNTHETIC LIQUID FUELS

Technologists of the Bureau of Mines, together with outstanding scientific men from private industry, have assembled, from the world's best available sources, data on the various processes for making synthetic liquid fuels. With the fall of Germany, the Bureau expects to add to this store of knowledge by investigating synthetic plants erected by the Germans which are known to have produced a large share of the motor fuels for the Nazi war machines. Preliminary construction has started on a research and development laboratory at Bruceton, Pa., near Pittsburgh. Engineers have surveyed possible sites for an oil shale research laboratory at Laramie, Wyo., and actual construction awaits the granting of materials priorities by the War