Need new decision mechanism

“With these exceptions, then, we didn’t have to worry about the relative importance of fields, as long as the pie was increasing, and a lot of money was increasing. Now it seems to me that we need to have a somewhat more effective mechanism of deciding among large expenditures. I don’t know what the mechanism ought to be, but clearly the present means of allocation are not adequate. I think this is one of the great challenges we have: I think all of us feel a little uneasy about this problem. We certainly don’t want to create a single agency to make these decisions. That would be inappropriate because then we would tend to do a monolithic kind of decision making. We want to maintain the pluralistic way of getting proposals and getting support. There’s no question about that.

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