Business Attorneys

Congress and the White House are locked in another budget battle, the temporary spending authority for much of the Government is dribbling toward expiration on Friday and threats of a Federal shutdown are again echoing up and down Pennsylvania Avenue.

But in curious contrast to this winter, when the Government did shut down twice, few here are taking the latest threat seriously. If Republican leaders in Congress and President Clinton cannot agree on spending levels for much of the Government by Friday — and that was said today to be doubtful — most experts say the two sides will decide to renew temporary financing, for perhaps another month, and keep on talking.

Congress has already committed itself to the passage of legislation raising the Federal debt ceiling to $5.5 trillion from $4.9 trillion, effectively enabling the Government to continue deficit spending until September 1997. Without action, Federal borrowing authority would also expire at midnight Friday.

It is a measure of how much the politics of the budget battle have changed since this winter, when the last Federal shutdown and a standoff over raising the debt ceiling provoked a public backlash against Congress.

It is also a measure of how much the struggle over Federal spending, once an all-consuming crisis, has become another featureless part of the Washington landscape. Congress has voted 11 times since October to provide temporary financing for Government agencies whose 1996 budgets have not been signed into law, and the fiscal year is not yet half over.

The Government’s 1996 budget was supposed to be signed into law by last Oct. 1, but only 8 of the 13 spending bills that allot money to Cabinet departments and other Federal agencies and programs have become law; the remaining 5, covering 9 Cabinet agencies and the District of Columbia, are still mired in debate.

The House and Senate have melded those five bills into a single $160 billion measure covering spending for the last half of the fiscal year, and members of both chambers are now meeting to iron out the details of a final version that will be sent to the President.

But with only two days left to finish, negotiators were still at odds with the President, and occasionally each other, over a long list of items, involving both money and policy.

The spending issues may be the easiest to solve. Mr. Clinton has demanded that Republicans add an extra $8 billion to domestic spending for the last half of the 1996 fiscal year, mainly for education, jobs training and the environment, and the Senate voted in its version of the bill to give him some $4.7 billion of that.

Mr. Clinton is now seeking another $1.8 billion atop the Senate’s allotment, mostly for the Head Start preschool program for the poor, veterans’ medical care and the environment, hinting that he would reject the bill unless he got it.

That provoked an angry Republican response. “I refuse to say that we ought to let the White House write appropriations bills,” Senator Don Nickles, an Oklahoma Republican who is a member of the Senate leadership, said on Tuesday. “If so, why do we have a Congress? If the Administration wants to shut down the Government because we’re not giving them enough money, that’s their option.”

But privately, Republican negotiators suggested today that the two sides might find a middle ground if they could find offsetting spending cuts elsewhere in the budget to finance the President’s priorities.

Among the environmental provisions are clauses, or riders, that would restrict Federal efforts to preserve wetlands and areas of the Mojave Desert, endorse further logging in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest and on other Federal lands, curb a Federal program to manage the Columbia River basin in Washington and Oregon, and limit the listing of newly endangered species.

Other riders, all adamantly opposed by the White House, would cap the Administration’s direct student loan program, restrict the use of money for Mr. Clinton’s much-prized national service program, convert some or all of Mr. Clinton’s cops-on-the-street grant program into lump-sum grants, usable for any law-enforcement purpose, and restrict Federal involvement in spending or policies that permit abortion.

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SHE was helping others get into the game, but did she have what it takes to be a player herself?

That self-posed challenge, Ann Kayman says, was among the reasons she went in 2002 from working as a New York City economic development official to running a small start-up business. Another reason, she says, was her desire to return to the private sector, though not to the world of corporate law, which she had practiced earlier for a dozen years but had lost interest in.

As a senior vice president of the city’s Economic Development Corporation from 1998 to 2002, Ms. Kayman helped businesses get started or expand. ”I would connect a business with any resources I could find, and I saw hundreds of companies start up,” she said. Eventually, she caught the entrepreneurial bug herself. ”I wondered if I could do it.”

Today, Ms. Kayman is the owner and chief executive of the New York Grant Company, which helps companies find and apply for government subsidies and incentives meant to foster business development.

From a utilitarian 30-by-30-foot office on Fulton Street in Lower Manhattan, Ms. Kayman, 44, and seven employees mine the maze of federal, state and municipal programs that provide tax exemptions and abatements, reduced-interest loans, job training grants and energy cost discounts.

They determine which programs their clients may qualify for, advise them on steps needed for compliance, prepare the often extensive documents they need and make sure the applications do not fall into bureaucratic crevices. So, like more than a few former public officials, Ms. Kayman has woven strands of her government experience into a private-sector career.

When she joined the New York Grant Company in September 2002, it was four months old, having been founded by a businessman, Salim Ismail, with a timely focus — and a built-in limitation. Its specialty was helping Lower Manhattan businesses obtain grants and loans from programs that had been established to foster the area’s financial recovery after the Sept. 11 attack. That was still its focus when Ms. Kayman came on board, she said recently.

But most of those programs were temporary, so the company would have to have a wider scope if it was to be more than a way station in her career.

She began expanding, first by seeking aid beyond that connected to 9/11, steering her Lower Manhattan clients to programs that predated the attack. ”We also began representing clients in Midtown,” she said. A current client, for example, is redeveloping a building and adjacent property near Times Square. ”We’ve gotten initial approval for them for real estate tax incentives that will be worth millions of dollars,” she said.

Her company now also writes program proposals that nonprofit groups, like arts and social service organizations, submit in seeking financing from foundations, corporations and government agencies.

Ms. Kayman bought the New York Grant Company from Mr. Ismail in 2003 for ‘’several hundred thousand dollars,” using up all her savings, she said. Since the company began, she said, it has helped about 850 businesses and nonprofit groups obtain $40 million. The company’s revenues last year were about $2 million, she said, providing a ”decent, not huge” profit.

Some government agencies and nonprofit groups provide free help to people seeking to form or expand small businesses, but Ms. Kayman said she did not see them as competition because ”they don’t give the kind of intensive” assistance her company does.

Intensive assistance was what one client, Joshua Aaron, president of a technology consulting firm in Lower Manhattan, said he needed when his company suffered sharp losses after the terrorist attack. The New York Grant Company helped his firm, Business Technology Partners, obtain $350,000 from various 9/11 aid programs. ”I don’t think we would have had the resources and time to follow the process” required to get the aid, he said. ”We were concentrating on rebuilding our core business.”

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TANGE MACK sits in front of a telephone console in a room at the Bayview State Correctional Facility on West 20th Street in Chelsea. Again and again, she tells callers where they can go to take the test for a driver’s license or to register their car.

The callers think Ms. Mack is an employee of the state Department of Motor Vehicles. But while the department does pay her a bonus of 35 cents an hour, Ms. Mack is not an employee of New York State. She is an inmate, serving 5 1/2 to 11 years for attempted arson and earning a base wage of 32 cents an hour for her labor. And she is part of a growing effort by the state and city correctional systems to employ inmates in a variety of occupations to help cover the cost of their incarceration.

Time was when license plates were one of the few products made by inmates in New York. But those days are over. Today, inmates awaiting transfer to upstate prisons bake some 18,000 loaves of crusty white bread a day in huge ovens at Rikers Island. The bread is sold to other government agencies and sent to homeless shelters and juvenile detention centers. Twenty blocks away, at a warehouse on 35th Avenue in Long Island City, state prison inmates wash cars and assemble office furniture sold to government agencies.

The employment programs allow inmates to fulfill the requirement that they must work, said a spokesman for the city’s Department of Corrections, Thomas Antenen. But critics contend that some programs cost far more to run than they should, that inmates learn few skills they can use when they are released, and that they sometimes take jobs from workers not behind bars.

Bracing a Dumpster-size trough with the weight of her body, a Rikers Island inmate identified only as Grace whispers ”C’mon baby,” as 1,500 pounds of dough lunge out of a two-story kneading machine. She and other inmates are paid 37 cents an hour to make sure the vats don’t slip from under the machines and to push them around the bakery. Asked what marketable skills the job teaches, Grace smiles. ”Absolutely nothing,” she says. ”It’s a way to stay busy.”

Once in the state prison system, many inmates go to work for Corcraft, the industrial arm of the State Department of Correctional Services. Corcraft workers build office furniture, steel shelving and bed frames. They stuff mattresses and they manufacture prefabricated prison cells, electronically controlled steel doors with ankle-level shackle slots and screened exercise enclosures.

But even though it rarely pays inmates more than 10 percent of the minimum hourly wage of $5.15, Corcraft is not profitable. A state comptroller’s audit released in 1997 found that it lost $46.9 million since 1980.

A spokesman for the Department of Correctional Services, Mike Houston, did not respond to questions about why the division is dripping red ink. But he noted that state law requires Corcraft to sell its products at fair market prices, and only to government agencies and schools, so that it will not compete unfairly with private manufacturers of similar products.

Ralph Woythaler, who owns a prescription-lens manufacturing plant in Long Island City, says the law did nothing to stop him from losing business. Mr. Woythaler said that after Corcraft expanded a lens-grinding operation at the state prison at Walkill, N.Y., four years ago and signed a contract with the state to provide Medicaid recipients with lenses, his business was cut in half. The drop, he said, was one reason he had to lay off 175 of his 225 workers. ”How can you take bread out of the mouths of the people who are paying taxes?” Mr. Woythaler asked. State officials would not provide a copy of the contract but acknowledged that one had been signed.

Corcraft’s prices for furniture and related products are significantly higher than those of many private manufacturers. State officials say that is because they do not want Corcraft, which pays such low wages, to compete unfairly by slashing prices. An executive desk from Corcraft costs a government agency $1,405, a credenza $1,169, and a three-seat office sofa $919. Similar items from Adirondack Direct, a large office furniture company with a distribution center a few blocks from Corcraft’s Long Island City warehouse, cost $995 for the desk, $1,050 for the credenza and $799.50 for the sofa.

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Secretary of State Warren Christopher has proposed a reorganization of the State Department that could consolidate three major independent Government agencies under his authority, senior Administration officials said today.

Under the proposal, which Mr. Christopher and Deputy Secretary Strobe Talbott presented to Vice President Al Gore last week, the agencies — the Agency for International Development, the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and the United States Information Agency — could lose their statutory authority and financing and be merged into the State Department.

The proposal is a response to a two-page directive by Mr. Gore on Jan. 3 to all Government agencies to present him with various options for reorganizing themselves before the Republican-dominated Congress does it for them.

The question posed to all of them went like this: If your agency were eliminated, how would your goals or programs be undertaken? By other agencies, by the states, by the private sector, or not at all?

Mr. Gore has asked aides to present him with a final recommendation for the State Department in time for President Clinton’s State of the Union Address, scheduled for Jan. 24.

Not surprisingly, the heads of all three agencies involved are opposed to any move to abolish them, senior officials said.

“The Secretary believes that things are not structured properly or logically, and that you wouldn’t structure foreign affairs accounts in this way if you were doing it over today,” said one senior State Department official. “He is asking one basic question: Is there a way to save money and carry out our functions better? He has told the Vice President this proposal merited very vigorous examination.”

Mr. Christopher was the first Cabinet-level official to respond in detail to Mr. Gore’s directive.

The Boston Globe reported today that the State Department favored the absorption of the development and the arms control agencies as part of a reorganization plan. But senior State Department officials said Mr. Christopher has not yet made a formal recommendation to abolish the three agencies, and will await the outcome of the two-week study.

The newspaper, along with CBS News, also cited unidentified officials as saying that Mr. Christopher has told his closest aides he wants to resign soon, a statement that the Secretary strongly denied today.

“The rumors of my departure are neither new nor accurate,” said Mr. Christopher, whose imminent departure from the State Department has been rumored for more than a year. He said he had made a New Year’s resolution for 1995 “not to get into it.”

The State Department estimates that consolidating the three agencies into the State Department structure would save from $300 million to $500 million a year.

The biggest target is the Agency for International Development, which several Republican lawmakers view as “pouring money down ratholes.”

Senator Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican who is the incoming chairman of the powerful appropriations subcommittee on foreign aid, has proposed a restructuring of the foreign aid program that would abolish the Agency for International Development and cut assistance to developing nations by about 20 percent.

But J. Brian Atwood, director of the agency, has argued against abolishing it and cutting foreign aid. “Those who suggest that our nation can afford to reduce our foreign aid budget still further are playing with fire,” Mr. Atwood said in a speech last month. He warned the Republican-controlled Congress that poorly conceived cuts would aggravate food shortages, disease, illiteracy and environmental damage around the world and fuel disorder in the post-cold-war era.

As for the arms control agency, which was created by President Kennedy and Congress to propose alternatives to war and the arms race, the Administration was poised to abolish it in early 1993. A draft report by Lynn Davis, undersecretary of state for international security affairs, concluded at the time that the agency “has eroded too far to be effective in the efforts to curb proliferation.”

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Programs for young people in New York City will be sharply affected by the Mayor’s budget plan. Nearly all youth programs will be eliminated, except for the Beacon Schools program, which keeps city schools open in the evenings for youth activities.

Indeed, the fate of the Department of Youth Services itself might seem to be in question, as the agency does not even appear in the Mayor’s budget documents.

However, the Commissioner, Alfred B. Curtis Jr., said yesterday that the agency will remain independent, indicating that it had won a reprieve from plans to merge it into another government agency.

The agency’s budget will be cut by about $20 million, from the $44.5 million allocated in the Mayor’s plan for the current fiscal year.

Among those programs cut by the Mayor’s new plan are Street Outreach, a program in which trained workers go into neighborhoods to spread the word about youth programs and recruit for anti-violence programs. Another is the Neighborhood Youth Alliance, a service program in which youngsters perform such tasks as cleaning parks and organizing immunization campaigns. Also to be discontinued is the Youth Line, which provides peer counseling for young people.

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Raising a warning flag about a possible budget deadlock when Congress returns next month, the White House said today that Federal agencies were preparing plans to shut down most operations in October should President Clinton and Republicans deadlock over a budget for the next fiscal year.

The order to prepare for closings came in a memorandum issued today by Mr. Clinton’s budget director, Alice M. Rivlin, who said Administration officials “very much don’t want it to happen” and were willing to negotiate with Republicans to avoid it.

But in fact, the order starts what will probably be a pitched public relations battle between two branches of Government over which would be blamed in the event of a string of closings that many say are inevitable and that Administration officials said could last days or even weeks.

Some Republicans, especially in the more conservative House, favor just such a showdown. They reason that Mr. Clinton will be seen as a big spender who is willing to close the Government down rather than let Republicans pare it back.

Most Democrats would prefer to strike a deal, hoping to be viewed as the force that moderates a Republican majority run amok. But Ms. Rivlin’s order underscored the White House’s determination, already made clear in a round of veto threats, to be seen as a defender of essential Federal services against Congressional attack.

“Congress can get these decisions made without shutting down the Government,” Ms. Rivlin said. “We very much hope there’s a full, frank and honest discussion of these issues before the deadline passes.”

Republicans scoffed at the memorandum, calling it an attempt to frighten the public. Only days ago, they noted, the White House issued another directive ordering the same agencies to draft plans to shrink themselves should the Republican spending bills become law.

“It’s the President who forces a shutdown of the Government anyway if he vetoes legislation we send up,” said the staff director of the House Budget Committee, Richard E. May.

As a legal opinion that accompanied Ms. Rivlin’s order noted, a shutdown of the entire Government is not in the cards, no matter how much Mr. Clinton and the Congress are at loggerheads. Even in the worst case, most Federal agencies would continue to provide essential services, and many benefit checks would continue to flow to retirees and, probably, the poor.

But unlike the seven previous times in which budget standoffs have shuttered some Federal agencies — all in the 1980’s and 1990’s, and all for a few hours or days at most — the fight brewing over Federal spending this fall is potentially much more serious, long-lasting and disruptive.

Ms. Rivlin’s short memorandum, which directed agencies to complete plans by Sept. 5 for a shutdown, cited only “a possible appropriations hiatus.” The longest Federal shutdown to date lasted but three days, in 1990, and even that closing affected only a weekend and a Columbus Day holiday.

But today, Administration officials made it clear in interviews that they are girding for a budget fight that could close parts of the Government for days or weeks, affecting not just Federal services but perhaps the economy as well.

At stake are the fates of 13 spending bills, covering next year’s budgets for most of the bureaucracy and a number of benefit programs, that Republicans intend to send to the President next month. Most propose to freeze or reduce the budgets of many Federal agencies and programs, and some would abolish programs and agencies outright.

Mr. Clinton has already pledged to veto more than half the bills in their present form, including those covering farm programs, Medicaid and other services to the poor, national parks and Federal lands, and the State, Commerce, Veterans and Treasury Departments. But a veto carries consequences: any agency without a legal budget on Oct. 1, the start of the new fiscal year, must end all but essential operations until Congress and the White House agree to give it money.

Source : query.nytimes.com

William H. Gates, the chairman of Microsoft, has spent this week on the television talk-show hustings, from “Larry King Live” to “Good Morning America,” extolling the virtues of Windows 95, which goes on sale today.

But last week, a software expert of sorts beat Mr. Gates to market, telling Dutch television that there was no reason to wait. Interviewed off-camera and dubbed Pete the Pirate, he asserted that he already had 50,000 illicit copies of Windows 95 ready for sale.

Piracy hype, reply executives at the Microsoft Corporation, who know something about aggressive marketing themselves. Most likely, the executives say, the European software pirate has made bootleg copies of a recent test, or beta, version of Windows 95.

But David Curtis, a general counsel at Microsoft who heads its worldwide antipiracy effort, acknowledges that the final version of Windows 95 has already appeared on a couple of computer bulletin boards. And, he says, it is at most a matter of weeks before high-quality counterfeit copies of Microsoft’s new operating-system software are on the market.

“We’re expecting a significant problem,” Mr. Curtis said. “Windows 95 has generated so much legitimate interest that you have to recognize that it will generate plenty of illegal activity as well.”

Windows 95, the successor to the DOS and Windows software that runs 100 million PC’s, is expected to be the most successful program in software history, and thus is expected to be the biggest opportunity ever for software pirates.

“Microsoft has to be scared silly that this product will be ripped off like no other,” said John C. Dvorak, a columnist for PC Magazine.

Without question, Microsoft’s new program presents the American software industry and law-enforcement agencies with their greatest challenge in trying to stem the tide of illegal software. The Business Software Alliance, a Washington trade group, estimates that the industry lost $15.2 billion worldwide to piracy last year.

Microsoft declined to disclose its internal estimate of piracy losses, but the software alliance says that if piracy were eradicated, industry revenue would double.

And Windows 95 is coming onto the market as the traffic in illegal software is becoming increasingly sophisticated and organized.

Most pirated software consists of copies made illegally by people in corporate offices, government agencies, schools and homes.

A person or company may buy a legitimate copy of a word-processing or spreadsheet program, for example, and then lend the disks to friends and colleagues. Each use, beyond the original purchaser, is a violation of copyright law, and therefore illegal. Roughly 90 percent of the illegal use of software in the United States comes from this kind of unorganized and informal copying.

But in recent years, professional counterfeiters have become more numerous and skilled. Some employ factories that turn out disks, while others focus on packaging and manuals.

Counterfeit software, which typically sells for a tiny fraction of the cost of the original version, is mainly sold abroad, so someone going to a major American retailer for Windows 95 runs no real risk of unwittingly buying a counterfeit copy.

Still, as the professional thieves make better and better copies, they have begun to sell in the huge American market, say law enforcement officials, who expect that counterfeit versions of Windows 95 will eventually show up in the United States.

Pirated programs are more likely to have viruses and flaws than legal software, and customer support services are not available.

The industry plays a constant cat-and-mouse game with the counterfeiters. Company innovations are quickly mimicked by the professional pirates, prompting new steps from the software producers. In 1991, for example, Microsoft began putting holograms on packages — shiny, reflective images of various kinds — to deter counterfeiting and make fake boxes easier to spot.

“The holograms weren’t as hard to copy as we thought at the start,” Mr. Curtis said.

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When the news media showed up at its gates this time, NASA let them in.

Not only is the investigation of this shuttle disaster more open than the inquiry into the destruction of the Challenger 17 years ago, the agency itself has presented a different, less-veiled face.

With questions about the necessity of manned space travel raised anew, NASA’s openness could help it take some of the edge off criticism of its operations.

Sean O’Keefe, the NASA administrator, has been a regular presence on news programs since disaster struck. NASA officials have been holding two news briefings a day at which they have answered most questions thrown their way. The agency has allowed the major networks to set up inside the Johnson and Kennedy Space Centers, in Houston and at Cape Canaveral, Fla. It has not stood in the way of interviews with the relatives of astronauts.

Many of the relatives have voiced passionate support for continued manned space travel — comments that have been echoed by a parade of former astronauts on television.

On the ”Today” show on NBC, Evelyn Husband, wife of Col. Rick D. Husband, the Columbia’s commander, read a statement from all the families that was fully supportive of the space program.

”Although we grieve deeply, as do the families of Apollo 1 and Challenger before us, the bold exploration of space must go on,” she said. ”Once the root cause of this tragedy is found and corrected, the legacy of Columbia must carry on for the benefit of our children and — and yours.”

Robert Jacobs, the NASA media services director, said the agency continued to urge the news media to respect the privacy of the astronauts’ families but noted that the space program tended to evoke passion from those involved in it.

”What you’re seeing is a true love for the space program,” he said.

Mr. Jacobs said the agency had tried to learn from its mistakes.

”Everything surrounding what happened with Challenger is always on people’s minds at NASA,” he said. ”There was an opportunity to look back at what was done, how it was done, why it was done, and then look for opportunities to make it better.”

NASA has historically been one of the most publicity-savvy government agencies. Included in its charter is a mandate to widely disseminate information about its missions. During the space race with the Soviet Union, it became adept at promoting its progress, most notably giving great access to publications like Life. It has its own television outlet, NASA TV.

”So much of the press for so much of its history has been great,” said Jeffrey Kluger, a senior writer at Time and co-author of ”Apollo 13.” ”But when they have had problems, it has been 50-50.”

The agency, he said, was criticized for a lack of openness after the Apollo 1 fire in 1967. It won over the news media with its openness during the Apollo 13 near-disaster in 1970.

At the time of the Challenger mission in 1986, ”it was an agency that had a huge store of good will,” said William Harwood, a space consultant for CBS News. ”Then the hammer came down.”

In the weeks and months after the Challenger disaster, NASA refused to answer the most basic questions, like what the ground temperature was at the time of liftoff. It refused to confirm whether any remains of the astronauts had been recovered. It sealed recovery areas away from camera crews. Referring to film that for the first time showed flame coming out of a Challenger rocket booster, the site of the problem, Mr. Harwood said, ”The public affairs guys were not allowed to use the word ‘flame.’ They called it an ‘anomalous plume;’ I’ll never forget that.”

A network news producer who has been working day and night on the coverage said he was surprised that NASA had not stood in the way of interviews with the family members of the dead astronauts.

”We thought they would put roadblocks in the way; they didn’t,” the producer said.

Reporters covering the investigation said they would remain on guard, especially if blame started to shift to NASA administrators.

Source : query.nytimes.com

The Clinton Administration decided today that the three Government agencies that play a major role in financing American exports abroad should not be merged, concluding that while the current system was fragmented and awkward, the political costs of reorganization were too high.

The decision came at a White House meeting of the National Economic Council, which coordinates major economic decisions for President Clinton much as the National Security Council reviews foreign policy decisions. While the decision before the council was a narrow one, it signaled that the Administration was in no hurry to heed calls from business leaders and a number of current and former Government officials that the system of programs to promote and finance exports needed a major overhaul.

The Office of Management and Budget has recommended merging the Export-Import Bank of the United States, which provides low-cost financing for American exporters; the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, which provides political-risk insurance to companies trading or investing overseas; and the Trade and Development Agency, which develops feasibility studies of overseas markets for exports and investment in emerging markets. All three need to be reauthorized by Congress this year.

In private, even many of the advocates of those programs concede that they are badly organized, largely because they were created one at a time by Congress, often with intersecting or conflicting charters. For example, the investment corporation is barred from operating in China, under legislation passed after the bloody suppression of protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989. But the other agencies are free to operate there. But supporters do not see a better way, yet.

”If we were starting from scratch, we certainly wouldn’t organize it this way,” one senior Administration official deeply involved in the debate said after today’s meeting. ”But the energy and time that would be consumed by reorganizing was judged not to be worth the benefits.”

The reauthorization seems almost certain to reopen a long-simmering argument between the Administration and the Republican majority in Congress over whether these agencies sustain jobs in the United States — as the Administration argues — or whether they are a form of ”corporate welfare.” Next week a coalition of forces led by Representative John R. Kasich, the Ohio Republican who heads the Budget Committee, plans to release a list of Government programs for industry that it wants to eliminate or vastly cut back.

Source : query.nytimes.com

In another sign of the auto industry’s struggle to make money selling electric vehicles, the Ford Motor Company said today that it was giving up on Think, an electric-car venture in which it sank $123 million. Instead, Ford said it would invest in other forms of alternative fuel technology like hybrid-electric vehicles and hydrogen fuel cells.

Ford’s move comes despite a regulatory mandate in California requiring manufacturers to offer up to 100,000 electric and other low-emissions vehicles a year, beginning with the 2003 model year, which officially starts Oct. 1. Similar requirements are pending in New York and Massachusetts, extending the mandate to one-fifth of the American auto market.

For now, the California law is blocked by a court injunction obtained by General Motors. Even so, G.M. announced earlier this month that it planned to give away thousands of its golf-cart-like electric vehicles to government agencies and other fleet operators in California and elsewhere, to meet the mandate should California ultimately prevail in court.

Sarah Tatchio, a Ford spokeswoman, said that the company had concluded that there were simply not enough customers interested in the Think vehicles, which are limited in their size and in the distance they can travel without needing a recharge.

Officials in California played down the significance of Ford’s decision. ”This is not a major dent in our efforts to clean the air,” said David K. Chai, a spokesman for Gov. Gray Davis.

Ford still plans to meet the California requirement. It will sell hybrid-electric vehicles, which are powered in part by gasoline, and hydrogen-fuel-cell vehicles, neither of which it offers for sale now.

Although auto industry officials have lobbied hard for California regulators to rewrite the requirement, Ms. Tatchio said any expectation of that happening did not play into Ford’s decision to back away from Think. ”We do have to meet the mandates,” she said.

Ford created Think in 1999, when it bought Pivo Industries of Norway for $23 million. It renamed the company and has since invested another $100 million in an attempt to develop a line of electric cars for sale to the public and government agencies.

The venture has two models: the Think City, a two-seat, plastic-bodied hatchback built at two plants outside Oslo, and the Think Neighbor, a golf-cart like vehicle with some car features, including a windshield and headlights. It is built outside Detroit.

Both models have fallen far short of Ford’s sales expectations. Ford hoped to sell 5,000 City cars a year, but has sold a total of just over 1,000 in three years. It has sold slightly more Neighbors, but its plant is able to build up to 10,000 a year.

One of Ford’s biggest customers for the Think City is the New York Power Authority, which purchased 100 for use in a program that leases the vehicles to commuters at eight suburban train stations and provides recharging facilities. Just this week, it said it was shifting 10 City cars to Huntington, N.Y., bringing the total available to Long Island commuters to 40.

Brian Warner, a spokesman for the agency, said officials were ”disappointed” at the Ford decision, but that the program would continue.

Ms. Tatchio said that Ford had not decided whether to sell or shut down Think. Ford stopped importing Think City cars in July, she said, and no further production is scheduled. Ford also plans to stop building the Neighbor at the end of the year.

Ford’s action comes in the midst of a broad cost-cutting drive, part of a turnaround plan by the company’s chief executive, William C. Ford Jr., that began in January. At the time, Mr. Ford, a self-described environmentalist, said that no part of the company was immune from review.

”It was a business decision, based on the market,” Ms. Tatchio said.

Ford will now shift resources into other programs on alternative fuel vehicles so that it can comply with California’s requirements. Under the regulation that has been blocked in court, 10 percent of an automaker’s sales in the state must be low-emission vehicles, including 2 percent that do not pollute at all.

Source : query.nytimes.com

A Government agency that helps finance American exports is incurring such losses that its capital will be wiped out within nine months, and it will ask Congress for a $3 billion bailout next month, its chief executive says.

A Government agency that helps finance American exports is incurring such losses that its capital will be wiped out within nine months, and it will ask Congress for a $3 billion bailout next month, its chief executive says.

John A. Bohn Jr., the president of the Export-Import Bank, said that since the early 1980’s its losses have averaged between $250 million and $300 million a year. For the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, the bank’s loss was a record $387 million.

The bank’s financial woes come during Federal budget constraints, with a deficit that must be reduced by $30 billion in fiscal year 1988, which began Oct. 1. Congressional analysts did not rate highly the Ex-Im Bank’s chances of getting a capital replenishment. Setback in October

At the same time, Government officials, economists and investors in the United States and abroad are greatly concerned with the nation’s trade deficit, which rose sharply in October to a record $17.6 billion, or 25.3 percent more than the September imbalance of $14.1 billion. A reduction in or an end to the bank’s support for American exports might contribute to a worsening deficit.

Behind the red ink are loans made in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s when interest rates soared. The bank lends to customers of American exporters at rates below the cost of the money it borrows from the Treasury.

In 1981, it paid as much as 15.75 percent interest to the Treasury’s Federal Financing Bank, while making loan commitments to customers of the Boeing Company, the Westinghouse Electric Corporation, Combustion Engineering Inc. and other exporters at rates of less than 10 percent. Other Nations Offer Aid

The Ex-Im Bank made the commitments to be competitive with the export credit agencies of Japan, France, West Germany and other countries offering similarly subsidized terms to promote their own exports.

Since 1982, industrial countries have agreed to limit credit subsidies, but the difference between the Ex-Im Bank’s average cost of its money and what it receives from its loans was still around 3.5 percentage points through most of this year.

The bank’s request is expected to spur Congressional debate over the extent to which exports should be subsidized, if at all, and the tradeoffs between such subsidies.

Preliminary Congressional reaction was divided, with supporters of the bank saying it should get the replenishment while opponents argued that programs should be put on a pay-as-you-go basis or eliminated.

”The overall financial state of the bank is terrifying news,” said Representative Don Bonker, Democrat of Washington, the home state of Boeing. But most legislators rated chances of getting $3 billion for the bank next year as slim. Besides the fiscal 1988 goal of $30 billion, the budget deficit must be reduced by $46 billion in 1989.

The business community is watching the debate closely.

”We’re concerned about the bank’s financial health, but it hasn’t yet affected operations,” said Bruce B. Talley, the executive director of the Coalition of Employment Through Exports, a Washington-based consortium of 50 business and 14 labor organizations.

Mr. Bohn said he welcomed the debate. ”The taxpayer has the right to know what this activity is costing,” he said in an interview last week.

Over the half-century of the Ex-Im Bank’s existence, taxpayers have paid between $2 billion and $3 billion for the subsidies it provides. But it has brought $190 billion in exports, Mr. Bohn said, adding, ”Spending $3 billion to facilitate $190 billion is not bad as Government programs go.” Authority From Congress

Legally, the bank could operate without any capital. It needs only the Congressional authority it receives every year to borrow from the Treasury. For fiscal year 1988, President Reagan had requested $1 billion and Congress has so far given the bank $690 million. Mr. Bohn is seeking $1.4 billion for fiscal 1989.

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In the last six months, studies cascading out of Government offices and private research centers have produced a new consensus on the need to overhaul the welfare system. This time around, work is perceived as the solution to dependency, and training and job placement as the way for long-term welfare recipients to break out of the cycle.

In the last six months, studies cascading out of Government offices and private research centers have produced a new consensus on the need to overhaul the welfare system. This time around, work is perceived as the solution to dependency, and training and job placement as the way for long-term welfare recipients to break out of the cycle. But as last week’s drafting sessions in the House and hearings in the Senate demonstrated, agreement on linking work to welfare is one thing, hammering out the details is another.

The divisions involve not only cost - President Reagan would spend no new money - but concept. One issue is parental care. Mothers of children under 6 do not have to participate in work programs now; some Republicans would require mothers of children under 3 to do so. Another issue is Federal-state relations. House Democrats would have Washington set a minimum standard, requiring each state to pay benefits equal to at least 15 percent of its median family income.

Senator Lloyd Bentsen of Texas, the Finance Committee chairman, projected the outcome last week. ”I want to guard against any false expectations,” he said. ”We are not about to bring about a magic transformation.”

THE bipartisan agreement that Aid to Families with Dependent Children should be transformed into a vehicle for education, training and work represents a major change from the attitudes of 1935, when the cash-grant program was created.

In the Depression, there was a surplus of labor, so Congress saw no reason to compel women with young children to enter the labor force. Now, more than 50 percent of women with children under the age of 6 work. So, the new consensus emphasizes the value of work as a source of dignity and self-respect, and the mutual obligation of welfare recipients and government agencies: Able-bodied parents have a responsibility to support their children, and government agencies are obliged to provide child care and other aid to help them do so.

The sense of obligation is expressed in the idea of a compact or a contract, a feature of several recent welfare proposals. According to Senator Daniel Patrick Monyihan, the New York Democrat who, as an adviser to President Nixon was instrumental in that Administration’s welfare revision, ”There is a strong bipartisan consensus that investing in basic educational and work-training skills now will produce a long-term payoff in reduced dependence on welfare, greater labor force productivity and increased tax revenues.”

The political popularity of work as a way out of welfare was clear two weeks ago, when a plan devised by Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, unanimously passed the Senate. Under the plan, states that succeed in training and finding jobs for long-term welfare recipients would get Federal bonuses, tied to the Federal savings produced by state efforts.

But agreement on the principles of change obscures profound disagreement about the design and cost of a new welfare system. Paula Roberts, a lawyer at the nonprofit Center for Law and Social Policy, compared eight major proposals and concluded, ”When you look below the surface, much of the consensus disappears.”

That became evident this month when President Reagan’s budget director, James C. Miller 3d, assailed the education and training programs and increased benefits that House Democrats are backing. The lawmakers have not been receptive to an Administration proposal, under which states could take Federal money from any of 59 existing social welfare programs and use it for experiments to end dependency.

President Reagan’s announcement of a welfare study in his State of the Union Message last year was a force behind the latest wave of interest in welfare policy. But proposals for sweeping change have come from many points on the political spectrum, from Governor Cuomo’s ”A New Social Contract: Rethinking the Nature and Purpose of Public Assistance” to the recommendations of the Working Seminar on Family and Welfare Policy, headed by Michael Novak of the American Enterprise Institute. Senator Moynihan’s plan is expected soon; he has been among those concerned about absent parents, especially fathers, who make little contribution to their children. Lawmakers predict that within 18 months, Congress will pass and President Reagan will sign a compromise bill setting new work requirements.

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A Congressional advisory group today called for a coordinated program to arrest the decline in animal, plant, insect and microbe species it said are disappearing at a rate perhaps not seen since the loss of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago., The recommendation came in a 334-page report prepared over the last two years by the Office of Technology Assessment, an agency chartered by

A Congressional advisory group today called for a coordinated program to arrest the decline in animal, plant, insect and microbe species it said are disappearing at a rate perhaps not seen since the loss of the dinosaurs 65 million ago., The recommendation came in a 334-page report prepared over the last two years by the Office of Technology Assessment, an agency chartered by Congress to advise on scientific and technological issues.

The study, ”Technologies to Maintain Biological Diversity,” is the most comprehensive assessment yet produced by a Government agency on the threat the loss of species poses to human welfare. The study proposes a wide range of Federal and private actions that could help reverse the trend.

Today’s report reflected the mounting concern among biologists over the loss of biological diversity, a concern that has been expressed with growing urgency at numerous recent conferences and in several scientific reports. Economic Threat Cited

The report said that the loss of valuable animals, plants, insects and microbes has now been acknowledged as a distinct threat to the economic future of major industries.

The pharmaceutical industry, for example, owes much to the discovery and isolation of compounds found in plants and animals. An important agent to fight viruses and cancer, the report notes, was isolated from a sea sponge found in Jamaica. But pollution in the Caribbean could threaten some unexamined species of sponges.

The report said that the United States, despite enacting 29 separate laws and having a host of Federal agencies to manage natural resources, does not have a coordinated program for addressing the decline in biological diversity. Role of Congress

The report places special attention on what Congress could do to strengthen the nation’s commitment to conserving biological resources here and overseas.

”The report points out that there is a whole range of people who are concerned or should be concerned,” said Susan Shen, one of the authors. ”The political support for a comprehensive program is potentially enormous.”

Extinction has always been a part of evolution, the report said. ”It’s estimated that 95 percent of the species that have ever existed are now extinct,” said Michael Strauss, another author. ”The significance now is that the rate of loss of species due to damage by man is higher than it’s been in a very long time.”

The report’s authors called on Congress to enact a separate act to provide guidance for a comprehensive approach to conserving biological resources. The goal would be to coordinate the wide array of Federal, state, and private programs in the United States and abroad that affect the prospects for species conservation.

Such an act, the authors said, could be administered by a separate body of advisers, similar to the President’s Council for Environmental Quality.

The report also calls on Congress and Federal agencies to amend 29 separate acts in order to encourage a consistent approach and make maintenance of biological diversity an explicit consideration of all Federal activities. Link to Aid Programs

Changes in how the United States administers foreign aid was also suggested in the report. Many of the plant genetic resources on which United States agriculture is based come from overseas, and it is important to prevent the loss of wild varieties of grain or ancient lines of livestock that could be valuable some day in breeding, the report said. Congress could help by tying conservation of genetic resources to its international aid programs, the report said.

The report suggests an array of research and education programs to promote public awareness of the issue and to develop new methods for conserving biological resources. The report said that the National Science Foundation could help establish a new scientific field called ”conservation biology,” which would train a generation of scientists in techniques for maintaining biological diversity.

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Last April, Luz Ortiz and her daughter were about to become a sad statistic: another New York City family shattered by domestic violence. Mother and child had been beating and abusing each other, leading finally to the teen-ager’s placement outside the home.

Last April, Luz Ortiz and her daughter were about to become a sad statistic: another New York City family shattered by domestic violence. Mother and child had been beating and abusing each other, leading finally to the teen-ager’s placement outside the home.

But four months ago they were reunited. The daughter, also named Luz, a 13-year-old former truant, is in school and is doing well. The two shop and sometimes cook together, or spend weekends on family outings - ordinary events, but also evidence of a new family stability.

”We’ve have learned to talk away our anger,” Mrs. Ortiz, speaking in Spanish, said through an interpreter.

Both credit their progress to an organization called Homebuilders, a crisis-intervention agency that in 1974 began working with families in Tacoma, Wash., and in Seattle, Wash., and opened a program in the Bronx last May. Fine Track Record

”Whether such a program can prevent a tragedy such as the battering death of 6-year-old Elizabeth Steinberg is not knowable,” said Ellen Schall, the city’s Commissioner of Juvenile Justice, who, with the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, which focuses on child-welfare issues, and others, helped bring Homebuilders to the city.

”What we do know is Homebuilders has worked with families in great difficulty,” Commissioner Schall said.

Homebuilders had an impressive track record. Of 2,400 families in Washington that it served between 1974 and 1985, 90 percent have remained intact.

The program departs from conventional approaches by providing a therapist to work intensively with families in their homes over four to six weeks.

Commissioner Schall said Homebuilders operatesmore economically than programs requiring placement of children outside the family home. The Bronx operation, with a first-year cost of about $400,000, is financed by the Clark Foundation and government agencies.

The success of Homebuilders, however, has raised fears about unrealistic expectations. ”We do not expect to end up with a perfect couple, an Ozzie and Harriet type of family,” said Peter Forsythe, a Clark Foundation vice president. Evaluating Committee

Mr. Forsythe and representatives of several New York City agencies, formed a committee last year to examine whether Homebuilders could be used in New York, which presented a more difficult challenge than Washington because of the city’s severe poverty and racial stresses.

”We felt if Homebuilders worked here, it would work anywhere,” said David Tobis, a sociologist from Welfare Research Inc., a Manhattan nonprofit agency, who headed the committee. An office site on Fordham Road was selected because it offered an economically and ethnically mixed neighborhood.

Since May 1, 22 families with 36 children have been served, and only six children have been placed outside the households either during or since Homebuilders intervened.

If the Bronx program continues to prove effective, the city’s Special Services for Children unit, a division of the Human Resources Administration, is considering duplicating the model in 1988.

Homebuilders was started by a husband-wife team, Dr. Jill Kenney, who has a doctorate in psychopathology, and Dr. David Haapala, a psychologist. ‘Out of Control’

Their original idea was to move into the homes of families they describe as ”careening out of control.”

”We joked about bringing along bulletproof sleeping bags and we also talked seriously about the possibility of all of us being killed,” Dr. Kenney recalled.

They dropped the live-in notion, but they kept their original premise: a child is better served by remaining at home with family and friends, and within the school and community setting.

In Washington, they have dealt with families involved in domestic violence, suicide attempts, mental illness and drug and alcohol abuse.

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In November 1985, New York City began what state officials called the nation’s most comprehensive mandatory effort to help single mothers get off welfare and into private jobs.

In November 1985, New York City began what state officials called the nation’s most comprehensive mandatory effort to help single mothers get off welfare and into private jobs.

Seventeen months later, the program is still in its infancy. But it is clear that the task is awesome and that the results have been mixed at best, according to dozens of interviews with city and state officials, welfare recipients and others who monitor the program.

Of the 75,000 mothers said to be eligible for the program, about 12,500 are now enrolled in job-training or basic education courses, and 5,000 more are working part time for government agencies, city officials say. But critics say that few people have found full-time jobs, and that the program is plagued by a lack of vital resources. Some Suspicions

The critics say, for example, that there are severe shortages of classes in the basic skills that many mothers need to become employable, such as basic education and English for people who speak little or no English. There also are not enough counselors to assess the mothers’ needs and to help them find appropriate job-training or educational programs, critics contend.

And there is a suspicion that many of the part-time government jobs are essentially busy work reminiscent of past ”workfare” programs, and fail to help mothers learn new skills. In the Bronx, for example, three women told of spending less than an hour a day making sure bathrooms had soap and toilet paper.

City officials say the criticism is unfair and unduly harsh. Looking Beyond the Numbers

They contend that the program should not be measured by the number of mothers who find full-time jobs, because it is trying to address, on a large scale, the needs of people who are often profoundly unskilled. The programs should be tested instead, they say, by the skills that welfare recipients are learning and by the positive values of self-help and discipline imparted through work experience.

”I think that the program as it’s been developed is pretty good,” said William Grinker, who became Commissioner of the Human Resources Administration three months ago. ”The work experience seems pretty good, by and large. The screening process is reasonable and there is an effort to get people out of the work experience program and into regular jobs. But we can do more along all of those lines.”

Mr. Grinker’s assessment of New York City’s effort comes at a significant time, when a consensus appears to be growing around the idea of overhauling the nation’s welfare system.

In the last two months, President Reagan, the National Governors’ Association and Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Democrat of New York, who is chairman of a Senate subcommittee drafting new welfare legislation, have all endorsed the idea of turning the system of income maintenance into a job-training and placement program. 75,000 MOTHERS ARE ELIGIBLE

New York City’s effort centers on about 75,000 mothers who have children 6 years old and older and who are enrolled in the nation’s largest welfare program, Aid to Families With Dependent Children. The women represent about 30 percent of all mothers on public assistance in the city.

The state, which oversees the social service programs operated by New York’s cities and counties, had long required that some welfare recipients work with state job counselors to be placed in full-time jobs and had encouraged voluntary job training and education.

But until 1985 there were no requirements for women with young children who either lacked skills or who could not find child care.

Now, the mothers are required to get a job, enter a job-training or remedial education program or work part time for a government agency. The government pays for the courses.

”The ultimate goal is to instill in people the notion that work is better than welfare and that they have the responsibility to do everything they can to try to push themselves toward self-sufficiency,” said Herb Rosenzweig, an executive deputy administrator of the Human Resources Administration, which runs the city’s social-service programs.

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Congress, taking a final step toward carrying out the 1988 budget compromise and rushing to adjourn for the year, approved a $17.6 billion deficit-reduction bill early today, including $9 billion in new taxes.

Congress, taking a final step toward carrying out the 1988 budget compromise and rushing to adjourn for the year, approved a $17.6 billion deficit-reduction bill early today, including $9 billion in new taxes.

The House and the Senate then turned their attention to the companion, $600 billion catchall spending bill, which provides spending for most Government agencies and programs.

Just before 2:30 A.M. the House voted 209 to 208 to pass the catch-all appropriations bill, with more than 125 Democrats opposing the bill because it includes $8.1 million in aid for the rebels fighting the Government of Nicaragua. The bill then went to the Senate for a vote. Both bills will be sent to the President, who is expected to sign them, together. Adjournment for the year will follow.

Together the bills provide about $33 billion of savings, $3 billion more than the goal set in the Nov. 20 budget agreement between the President and Congressional leaders. The compromise projects a deficit reduction of $46 billion in 1989.

The votes on the deficit-reduction bill were 237 to 181 in the House and 61 to 28 in the Senate.

The Senate, in a surprise move, also approved and sent to the House a $15 billion housing assistance bill Monday night. The legislation, which appeared dead after the threat of a veto by President Reagan last month, was resurrected following weeks of negotiations between lawmakers and the Administration. [ Page A20. ] The action capped a marathon all day and night session as the House, the Senate and the White House scrambled to work out last-minuted disputes and approve the two bills, which were produced after a grueling week of negotiations between negotiators from the House and the Senate.

House and Senate negotiators opened the way for a vote on the catchall spending bill Monday night when the House dropped its insistence on a provision that would renew a regulation on broadcasters, which the President had threatened to veto. The bill was then sent to the House where debate began early this morning.

A close vote was predicted in the House because of the opposition by many liberals to the $8.1 million in aid for the Nicaragua rebles included in the bill.

In addition to the $9 billion in tax increases the two bills include about $12 billion of cuts in the military budget and domestic spending, a one-time $7.6 billion saving from the prepayment of Government loans, the sale of some Government assets, new Government user fees and $2.8 billion from savings on interest on the national debt and increased collections from tougher enforcement by the Internal Revenue Service.

”This will be the most significant reduction in the deficit by act of Congress in the history of the budget process,” said Senator Pete V. Domenici of New Mexico, the ranking Republican on the Senate Budget Committee. Repeals Automatic Cuts

With the achievement of the deficit reduction in 1988, the bill approved by the House also repeals the $23 billion in automatic spending cuts, half of them in the military budget, that went into effect Nov. 20.

After agreeing to provide $8.1 million in aid to the Nicaraguan rebels, it seemed Monday morning that the House and Senate could act relatively quickly on the two bills. But the simmering dispute erupted over the inclusion of a provision to renew a requirement that radio and television stations give time for opposing views on public issues, forcing the legislators to put off final action into the evening and raising the threat of a Government shutdown Tuesday. A one-day stopgap spending bill expired midnight Monday.

A separate dispute also arose over the exact amount of aid to the rebels, with Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut, arguing the measure, including air defense equipment and coverage for lost aircraft, brought the total to $14.4 million.

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The Environmental Protection Agency, in a reflection of its ongoing budget problems, is dropping a key program for measuring the exposure of humans to toxyc substances, agency officials said today.

The Environmental Protection Agency, in a reflection of its ongoing budget problems, is dropping a key program for measuring the exposure of humans to toxyc substances, agency officials said today.

The program, which measures the accumulation of dangerous substances in body fat, is the Government’s chief means of determining the threat to humans posed by toxic chemicals in the environment.

Lack of funds is also forcing the agency to drop other monitoring and public health programs, officials said, including a new survey to measure the accumulation in human blood of toxic substances that do not tend to gather in fatty tissue.

The decision on the toxic survey was first disclosed by the Foundation for Advancements in Science and Education, a nonprofit group dedicated to public health and environmental concerns.

Scientists, medical doctors, environmentalists and others who depend on the survey data complained today that the the exposure survey was necessary and irreplaceable. $2 Million a Year Martin P. Halper, director of the exposure evaluation division of the agency’s office of toxic substances, said the decision to drop the program had been dictated solely by budget considerations. The environmental agency’s budget has remained roughly level for the last decade while the scope of its mission has broadened significantly to include regulation of toxic substances, toxic wastes and drinking water sources.

According to Mr. Halper, the survey, which costs less than $2 million a year, is a discretionary program run by outside contractors. He said the agency’s toxic substances budget was adequate only for carrying out tasks required by Congress.

In making the decision, Mr. Halper said, officials were considering not only the agency’s current budget but also the prospect of continued austerity under the deficit reduction agreement worked out last week by negotiators for the White House and Congress. What Chemicals to Regulate

Government agencies occasionally disclose information about budget cuts in order to pressure Congress to restore money. But in this case, officials within the agency and users of data provided by the survey insisted that dropping the program would be a serious loss.

They noted that the program, whose official name is the National Human Adipose Survey, provides the only long-term measure of humans’ absorption of chemicals in the enivornment and thus helps determine what chemicals to regulate.

The officials noted that survey determined that virtually every American had polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCB’s, a suspected human carcinogen once widely used in electrical equipment, stored in their body fat. This finding, they said, played a major role in banning the production of PCB’s.

The tests have also shown that the levels of PCB’s in body fat have fallen dramatically since regulatory action was taken in the 1970’s.

”It’s almost crazy” to be dropping such a crucial program, said Joseph J. Breen, chief of the field studies branch in the environmental agency’s toxic substances office. He noted that the laws on toxic substances required chemical companies to make information about the toxicity of its products available to the public, but that the raw information can be of only limited value without information on human exposure to those chemicals.

”There are 60,000 chemicals out there,” he said and added: ”How do you sift it out? How do you winnow down to those chemicals that the health scientists have to do something about?” Tissue From Accident Victims

The survey was started in 1967 by the Public Health Service and transferred to the environmental agency when it was established in 1970. Among other things, the survey has found high levels of such suspected carcinogens as DDT and dioxins in human body fat. It also found that the levels of DDT declined after the pesticide was banned.

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