the standpoint of the radiation factor, but also you have the problem of livability. What are the estimates of costs for a nationwide shelter program such as you have put forth. That is, survey and improvement of existing structures. What are the dimensions of the cost of improving the shelters so they are not only livable but give a reasonable degree of protection from radiation?

Mr. DEVANEY. Well, to begin with, based on the few shelter surveys we have, and this is from the pilot studies made, it looks like it might be feasible to make improvements that would provide shelter for about 25 million people more than you can get without the improvements, and that is about the limit to what there is in existing buildings.

Mr. ROBACK. Will you state that again? Twenty-five million people above those who would find their own way?

Mr. DEVANEY. No. Let us say that, when we mark the existing shelter, we could find acceptable shelter now for about 40 to 50 million people. If we make the feasible improvements in those buildings, we could increase the amount of shelter to 75 million; in other words, provide shelter in existing buildings for 25 million more people. That is all there probably will be. You cannot feasibly improve all buildings to shelter all people, because it would probably cost much more than to build separate shelters out in the park, let us say. All buildings are not susceptible to improvement.

Mr. ROBACK. What are the dimensions of the cost of these 25 million spaces to be upgraded?

Mr. DEVANEY. It would be on the order of $12 billion, probably, for the total cost, public and private.

Mr. ROBACK. $12 billion to

Mr. DEVANEY. Shelter that 25 million.

Mr. ROBACK. To get 25 million more people into existing shelters. What are the premises of radiation protection, that is, the degree of attenuation? Everybody can come in out of the rain in this country, you know, if he gets under a roof. The question is how good is the roof from the standpoint of fallout or other radiation.

Mr. ELLIS. You know these questions really pertain to a function which is now being performed by DOD.

Mr. ROBACK. I understand.

Mr. ELLIS. Of course, we do have a background of experience in the area, and the question is difficult to answer because the degree of protection that you may have is dependent upon the amount of money that you spend; thus, your expense would be difficult to determine. It would have to be just on the basis of minimum criteria, and that would be what you would have to assume. You would have to assume a lot

in order to answer the question.

Mr. ROBACK. Well, these studies were prepared and worked up pretty well in the OCDM.

Mr. ELLIS. That is right.

Mr. ROBACK. To a degree the Department of Defense is now taking over a majority of this work, and maybe keeping its fingers crossed about some of the estimates, I do not know.

But in any event, you have testified that the improvement program is of the order of $1.5 billion, Mr. Devaney?

Mr. DEVANEY. Yes.

FEDERAL, STATE, LOCAL, AND PRIVATE COSTS INCLUDED IN $20 BILLION ESTIMATE

Mr. ROBACK. What then does the $20 billion figure comprise that we have heard here from time to time, timewise, shelterwise?

Mr. ELLIS. I do not think that figure given here was in order. To be perfectly frank with you, it is a figure contemplated first an expenditure by the Federal Government which would stimulate in turn, State, municipal, county, local and individual expenditures, and all of those expenditures wrapped together would run to a figure of that amount over a 5-year period.

Mr. ROBACK. In other words, this was not a Federal budgetary figure.

Mr. ELLIS. No, sir; it is not a call upon Federal funds whatever. Mr. ROBACK. All right.

Now, we gather from the testimony of the Secretary yesterday that the requests he was making for $207 million were in relation to the marking program, and the identification program. Nothing was said beyond that.

Do you have in your office any concept of a 5-year program or a 10-year program for civil defense?

Mr. ELLIS. Obviously we have studied it on the basis of those periods of time, and we have submitted preparations and plans, but they have never been officially accepted or officially adopted.

Mr. ROBACK. Are you in position, Mr. Ellis, to give us some idea of what a 5-year program would cost in terms of need?

Mr. ELLIS. I would prefer not to do that now without further study and discussion with Budget and with other areas of our operations. I believe it is so serious that a rough estimate should not be given to the committee. It would be misleading.

GAO AUDIT OF CIVIL DEFENSE PROGRAMS

Mr. ROBACK. One of the statements made by the chairman when he opened these hearings had to do with the effort to avoid the pitfalls of the past.

Now, some criticisms of civil defense go to concept, some of them go to administration, perhaps. We have been advised by the General Accounting Office staff, who have made various surveys, audit surveys in the civil defense field, that they have made certain findings. If I may just refer to the Comptroller General's statement, and this statement will be placed in the record with the committee's permission, the gist of it, as I recall, is that in the grant aid program and in the donable property program, both of which now are within the jurisdiction of the Secretary of Defense, substantial amounts of the equipment, certainly at least under the portion surveyed by the General Accounting Office, have been diverted to noncivil defense uses. (See Appendix 8A, p. 391.)

Suppose a local organization needs and wants a fire truck, and gets it through civil defense channels but uses it for the community. Maybe that is good or maybe it is not good. But the question is whether the Congress intended that the program be administered in that way.

The GAO is making a serious statement that most of the civil defense equipment donated under the special provisions of the law that permits it, and the grant aid program, to the degree that it was surveyed by the General Accounting Office, is going for noncivil defense purposes, being diverted from its intended uses.

Mr. ELLIS. Well, I can illustrate a situation like that.

For instance, we have a tugboat that is surplus property, and we turned it over to a political subdivision. They either tie it up at the dock and let it rot, waiting for an emergency to arrive, or use it for some occasional service so that it could be available for civil defense matters, a drill or something of that sort. They keep it in shape by using it that way, and often that is an intelligent way to handle the

matter.

Mr. ROBACK. Well, the General Accounting Office criticizes your agency—this is not necessarily your responsibility, you inherited it. Mr. ELLIS. That is right. We tried to tighten up on it.

Mr. ROBACK. It criticizes your agency for failing to develop criteria and enforce reasonable compliance with the criteria.

Have you been acquainted with this problem? Has your attention been directed to it?"

Mr. ELLIS. Yes, sir; it has been called to my attention. It has been subject to criticism and, therefore, we have tightened the reins on it. Where one agency requests the use of certain barges, for rental pay— in other words, after they got them as surplus equipment they wanted to rent them out, and we refused to permit that to be done, and then they had no alternative, because they could not afford to maintain them, but to turn them back.

We have put the reins on this because we do not want to be in violation of the regulations of the General Accounting Office in any way. Mr. ROBACK. Will you instruct one of your staff to examine a copy of the statement which we have from the Comptroller General and be prepared to respond at tomorrow's meeting when we have followup testimony?

Mr. ELLIS. Yes, sir. We are very familiar with the audit.

ROLE OF OEP DIRECTOR IN EMERGENCY OPERATIONS

Mr. ROBACK. What is your concept, Mr. Ellis, of the emergency authority which the President reserved for himself, that is, your role in the emergency?

Mr. ELLIS. Well, in my statement I did comment pretty elaborately on that.

Mr. ROBACK. I am thinking in terms not of all the things that have got to be done, that have to go into operation, but in terms of directing, the supreme directing authority in the country at the time of emer

gency.

If the President is incapacitated as a casualty of the attack, does his function devolve on you as the Deputy, or do they devolve upon a successor under the Presidential law of succession? Was there any thinking along this line, before this delegation was made to the Secretary of Defense, as to whether the Administrator of Civil Defense conceived of himself as the director of operations?

I think your predecessor, Mr. Hoegh described himself as civilian chief of staff. You know what a chief of staff does in an emergency? Mr. ELLIS. Yes.

Mr. ROBACK. Are you the civilian chief of staff?

Mr. ELLIS. I do not think the President has given me that title. Mr. ROBACK. Do you think Mr. Hoegh promoted himself?

Mr. ELLIS. I do not know that he did that. I think the strength and the power that this agency would have would emanate from the President. But it conceivably could be a very important and really a more important role than we enjoyed when we had operational functions within the organization which took up so much of the time. Mr. HOLIFIELD. I think you can if you are given the authority by the President to do that.

Mr. ELLIS. That is the pulse of it.

Mr. HOLIFIELD. It would be the hope of this committee that the Office of Emergency Planning would be given a strong

Mr. ELLIS. Role.

Mr. HOLIFIELD (continuing). Role by the President, and with the authority of the President behind it to do the job that is going to have to be done in national planning and national coordination and in informing the President of the implementation of the various segments of the plan.

If it does not get that kind of a mission and that kind of support, why, it is going to be futile, and we would not want to see that. We will proceed a little further in order not to have an afternoon session.

Mr. ELLIS. Yes, sir.

FORMER OCDM SHELTER PROGRAM PLANS

Mr. ROBACK. Will you restate now, so that the record is clear, Mr. Ellis, what, beyond the marking and improvement program for existing shelters, your office was prepared to do in the way of a shelter program for the United States?

It is important to get clearly in the record that information, because the words are used by many people in different senses and they are used loosely. As I say, we frequently see references to shelter construction. Somebody has got to do the constructing, who digs the dirt, who puts in the foundation? Does your office have a program or was it going to have a program which went beyond the identification, marking, and improvement of existing structures?

Mr. ELLIS. Well, sir, we did contemplate, and have sought, as you know, from the Congress the necessary money to place fallout shelters in existing Federal buildings, in new Federal buildings, including developing a pilot plan to place fallout shelters in existing Federal buildings.

In addition to that, we had recommended a medical procurement program substantially in excess of the procurement program that has been granted, and also in the area of food distribution and in the area of construction of community shelters or in the area of attempting to aid in the construction of home shelters. We did not recommend a program on that basis to the President because of the cost involved, and in the framework of the cost we made other recommendations.

We made recommendations on incentives and matters of that character to stimulate the do-it-yourself programs at the local levels.

We also recommended a new and changed matching program in order to liberalize that feature, and we were preparing to go into the program of possible construction of shelters under loans or through matching funds for eleemosynary institutions and hospitals and other areas throughout the country; all combined with a really stepped-up public education program that would, perhaps, bring about more local cooperation under Federal leadership.

We have not been idle. Our program section has been reviewing every program. We assessed all the programs and all of this we made available to the Secretary of Defense.

EDUCATION AND INCENTIVES FOR PRIVATE SHELTERS

Mr. ROBACK. In the shelter program, now the responsibility resides with the Secretary of Defense. To a large extent and over a period of years, the incentives were emphasized, because of the do-it-yourself program, and you really require incentives for such a program. The Secretary did not talk about family shelters or basement or home shelters because that has to do with incentives, and we might suppose that the Department of Defense is not the appropriate agency to encourage individual families to do things like that. That might be a more appropriate function of a civilian agency, wouldn't you say? Mr. ELLIS. Well, it is a matter of the overall interpretation of the public information program, and certainly the President of the United States plays a very important role in setting that leadership and disseminating public information, which I would think would be more openly received than possibly it would coming from another

source.

Mr. ROBACK. What I am trying to get at is, what is the division of labor here in the shelter field so far as education, incentives, and construction are concerned?

Mr. ELLIS. Yes.

Mr. ROBACK. We might assume that the Department of Defense would concern itself with that part of the shelter effort which is distinctly Federal building and planning, a Federal building program.

When we are talking about Bureau of Docks and Engineers, we do not see these burly seamen and Army officers knocking at the garden gate and talking to housewives about a basement shelter. That concept does not seem to add up.

They have got a rather special function, and if they do not have a program, maybe the assignment does not make any sense. I am trying to find out what the program is.

Mr. ELLIS. Well, you are in the area of public information, I am going to answer it and tell you that I have suggested that, as the first order of business, in order to capitalize on what seems to be a new and invigorated public attitude of acceptance toward a shelter program, that we immediately get out to every home, and it is going to be a very expensive project, this pamphlet which would contain a letter from the President, and a joint letter from the Secretary of Defense and myself, and other certain selected documentation, saying to the people, "This is what you can do."