Comment from Thomas Johnson

I am writing to strongly oppose this OMB regulation. A little on my background: I was a faculty member in the geosciences for 40 years after receiving my Ph.D. in oceanography from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UCSD, in 1975. My research involved seismic reflection profiling and the recovery of sediment cores from the tropical Pacific, the North Atlantic, and the Alaska Arctic for 20 years before deciding to apply my oceanographic expertise to the study of the large lakes of the world - working mostly on the Great Lakes of East Africa While some of the funding for my research on the African lakes came first from oil companies interested in the oil potential of the very thick sediment sequences (~4 km) underlying the rift lake basins, most of my funding came from the National Science Foundation through grants won after rigorous scientific peer review. Much of this research focused on clarifying the climate history of East Africa based on highly sophisticated organic geochemical analyses of sediment cores reaching back many thousand years in time. These results enable climate dynamics experts to improve their climate models to more accurately predict what future trends in rainfall and temperature will impact the agriculture and well being of humanity in the region. The funding covered the costs of needed field and laboratory instrumentation, shipping containers of instrumentation to the African field sites, obtaining research permits, dealing with logistical challenges, chartering and modifying African fishing trawlers to handle our geophysical field programs, collaborating with local scientists and students, covering transportation expenses of American colleagues, students and technicians, and subsequent laboratory anayses and publication of results. I viewed the most important aspect of this challenging research program was involving undergraduate and graduate students in all aspects of this research - exposing them to foreign culture, trial and tribulation "at lake" when caught in a major storm or when equipment broke down and had to be repaired on site, learning sophisticated laboratory analyses, writing up their observations, and making oral presentations to both scientific audiences and the general public. My students obtained good jobs in oil companies, environmental consulting firms, and in education, both at the high school and university levels. The OMB regulation would undoubtedly lead to politicians over-ruling scientific peer review to occasionally (frequently?) award less qualified science proposals because they didn't like the subject of a proposal, or it was not submitted from someone in their state, or because the proposed research included work with foreign collaborators, etc. Such political oversight would undoubtedly lead to a serious decline in the quality of scientific research in the United States.