Interview: Dr. John V. Byrne

INTERVIEW

Dr. John V. Byrne

NOAA Administrator 1981-1984

Dr. John Vincent Byrne earned his B.S. in marine geology from Hamilton College, an M.S. in geology from Columbia University, and his Ph.D. in marine geology from the University of Southern California. He was Oregon State University’s first dean of oceanography, and was vice president for research and graduate studies and dean of research. Between 1972 and 1977, he was director of the Hatfield Marine Science Center. Byrne was nominated to serve as the administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) by President Ronald Reagan in 1981. He held the position until 1984, when he returned to Oregon State University to become its president.

Dr. John V. Byrne during his tenure as NOAA administrator, 1981-1984.

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How did you come to NOAA and what was the process like?

Dr. John V. Byrne: The first thing you need to know is that we started an oceanography program here at Oregon State University. And I was one of the first people hired. Subsequent to that, I became a department chair and then I became dean of the school as it evolved into something larger. During this period, I was asked to participate on a number of national committees. So, when Ronald Reagan was elected, and that was 1980, they were looking for an oceanographer for NOAA. And the reason for that was that Bob White, the first administrator, was an atmospheric scientist, and Dick Frank, the second administrator, was an environmental lawyer. And the ocean interests on the Hill were looking for an oceanographer. My name came up on the list of potential candidates, and through the whole process I ended up being asked to be the administrator. So, it was the result of having been active on a number of national committees and then going through the process.

Coming in from the private sector, what was your impression of the scientists, the employees, the different administrators that worked at NOAA as far as their expertise?

Well, I think the best example, the easiest example, is the Weather Service. At the time, there were a number of examples where the people in the Weather Service, they had bad weather, and they stayed in the office until they had the accurate forecast out, and in some cases, actually overnighted in the office. And to me, that was a symbol of dedication and taking their job very, very seriously. These people are dedicated. They work hard. They give more than is expected of them.

Now on the other side of that, the negative side, is that frequently, scientists become enamored with their own science. If they are biologists, they have a certain affection for the organisms they are working with and so on. And they can bias the reports by the words they use – still stating the facts, but in such a way that it gives a certain tone to their reports. So we had to counter that on a couple of occasions. But again, they were dedicated scientists. They cared about the science they were doing. I think the same was true about the support staff, who wanted to do everything they could for the people they worked with and the people they worked for.

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What did you find to be the most challenging issues you had to work through during your time at NOAA?

Well, we had a number. On one occasion, one of the weather satellites failed, so we had to move the GOES West satellite eastward and use Japanese satellites for the weather over the Pacific. That was a challenge. … Frequently we had conflicts in the fisheries area. Crab fishermen got sideways with fin fishermen. So, there were conflicts among the fishing industry.

Probably the most challenging was the folks that oversaw us in the Office of Management and Budget [OMB] took the Reagan policies very seriously, as they should have. And they weren’t knowledgeable in terms of the science, or the environment, or whatever it was we were working on, so they would resist some of the things we tried to do, or they would misinterpret what was involved.

There are a couple of examples of that. We had proposed a limited entry halibut fishery around Alaska. We had everybody lined up ready to go with that. And literally, within a day, an employee of the Office of Management and Budget told us, “You can’t do that. That’s not the American way.” That was one example. Another example was in terms of charging the full cost for some of the services and some of the activities that we did. OMB wanted us to full charge the cost of nautical charts. We interpreted that to mean the printing, the distribution, that sort of thing. But their intention was that all of the surveys that went into it should be part of the cost that people purchasing the charts would have to pick up. That certainly wasn’t realistic. Charts that would cost up to less than $10 apiece, it would drive the price up to sometimes several orders of magnitude more than that. So, it was difficult to explain that to the folks who monitored us in the Office of Management and Budget.

Anyway, I can keep going with examples. They wanted us to privatize the Fruit Frost Warning Program. It was a program where the guys in the Weather Service in areas that produced citrus fruit would make forecasts as to when the temperatures leading to frost would occur so the farmers could put their smudge pots out and that sort of thing. It didn’t make sense because we didn’t have any person who was totally dedicated to that program. So, we proposed charging for the Fruit Frost Warning Program, and that did not go over well with the private sector, with the farmers and so on. So, we had those kinds of problems. I suppose if you wanted to simplify it, it was a matter of translating policy to action. And that’s where the problems were in many cases.

How did you feel about the sort of push-pull or tug of war between science and political policy?

I have a tendency to want to use anecdotes. During my first oversight hearing, Sen. Frank Lautenberg asked me whether we had enough money to do research. And my answer to him was, “No, you never have enough money to do all the research you want to do,” which was interpreted by some people to mean I was opposed to the president’s policy, which was not the case. It was just a matter of making people who were not involved with doing scientific research understand a little bit more than they did about the nature of research and the fact that it really does produce more questions than it does answers. You know, it was that sort of thing. It was a matter of … it wasn’t a controversy so much as a discrepancy between understanding of certain issues, particularly scientific and environmental issues, for NOAA.

What do you consider the most important accomplishments for NOAA during your tenure there?

Oh, gosh, I don’t know what the most important accomplishments were. It was one of those things where the Weather Service was improving. And that is an extremely important part of NOAA. The other problem I guess was that Tony Calio and I – mostly Tony – reorganized the structure of NOAA somewhat. The Fisheries Service, the Weather Service, the Satellite Service, and so on all thought of themselves as independent units, which they were to a great extent. We constantly referred to the Weather Service as the National Weather Service – not the NOAA Weather Service, but the National Weather Service. And that’s the way these organizations thought of themselves. The National Marine Fisheries Service thought of itself as an independent agency devoted to fisheries and so on. So that was a constant challenge. But I always thought the guys worked pretty well together. So, NOAA really was sort of a holding company for a number of scientific units. The Coast and Geodetic Survey had been morphed into the National Ocean Service. And they did the surveys, which was pretty much independent of the rest of NOAA. And I think that was one of the constant annoyances, I suppose, that we really were not as successful as we should have been in terms of integrating all of the different aspects of NOAA.

Now, one of the things that I tried to do, at least on my watch, was because of the complexities of the scientific units of NOAA – the Weather Service, the National Marine Fisheries Service, all of these – we tried to create NOAA Service Centers that were offices set up in cities like Seattle and Anchorage and so on where there would be somebody who was knowledgeable about the nature of NOAA. People who came in with a specific problem could express their problem, and the NOAA employee on the spot would know who to contact or how to contact different people within NOAA who could help solve that individual user’s problem. Well, that got off to a reasonable start, I thought. But it cost money. So, when push came to shove – and this was subsequent to my time at NOAA – the NOAA Services Centers were one of the first things to go. So, you always had that problem: You always had the problem of budget and that sort of thing. I think that all the time I was at NOAA, we had a budget once and the rest of the time we were operating on a continuing resolution. So another constant problem was funding. And these are not unique problems. They probably exist the same way today.

One of the signature things that happened during your administration had to do with whaling. I wondered if you could just talk about that a little bit.

Well, traditionally, at least up until the time I was the administrator, the administrator of NOAA was the United States representative to the International Whaling Commission [IWC]. I don’t know how much that continued after my watch, but on my watch, the Whaling Commission passed a moratorium on commercial whaling. I could go into a lot of chapter and verse on that one. But it was, in a sense, a recognition by the United States government of the importance of serving the environmental community, who didn’t want to see whales killed. So, it was figured out that if we get enough nations that are non-whaling nations, they would have the vote in the Whaling Commission to pass this moratorium. The idea of the moratorium was, “Well, some of these whaling stocks seem to be endangered. Let’s stop whaling them and see if they can recover.” So that was the idea on the holding back on commercial whaling.

This is pretty arcane stuff, but the Whaling Commission didn’t really have any power. It had recommendations it could make. It could set quotas for the taking of numbers of whales, but there wasn’t any way of enforcing that. One of the provisions was that you could continue to whale for research purposes. And that’s what the Japanese did. The Japanese were far and away the largest effective whaling nation. There were others, but the Japanese were the No. 1. And we always figured if we could shut off the Japanese market for whale meat, you could pretty much stop whaling. So that was the intent. The moratorium was passed – I think it was 1982 – to go into effect several years later, and it affected commercial whaling. The whalers were basically Iceland, Japan, Norway, the Soviet Union, and so on. The Russians, the Soviet Union, stopped whaling because their whaling fleet was giving out and they didn’t want to replace the vessels. So, they were not a problem. Norway was taking whales in the North Atlantic and at that time selling about 85 percent of the whale meat to the Japanese. Iceland was in and out – if they didn’t get their way at the Whaling Commission, they would withdraw from the IWC, that sort of thing. So those were the issues we faced.

The other thing I should mention to you is if a whaling nation did not like the quota that was set for them, they could file an objection within 90 days of the Whaling Commission meeting. And a number of nations did that. Well, the Japanese did that when we passed the moratorium on commercial whaling. So, the next task was to get the Japanese to withdraw their appeal, to withdraw their refusal to go by the quota that was being set. So that was the next task. And that was about the time I left NOAA. I worked the situation with Secretary Baldrige [Malcolm Baldrige Jr., then serving as the U.S. secretary of commerce] and, I suppose, ultimately with the president, to continue as the whaling commissioner after I left NOAA and came back to Oregon State as its president. And so, for one year I was the whaling commissioner and the president of Oregon State. And we still had to set quotas because the moratorium had not gone into effect [yet]. But we still had those issues. The hardest issue for me was getting whale quotas for the Alaskan Eskimos, which made the United States a whaling nation under that particular provision of the agenda and a nonwhaling nation on all the other issues. So those were all the challenges that we faced.

I understand the Japanese have withdrawn and are no longer members of the IWC. The IWC was set up originally to ensure that there was a sustainable number of whales that could be harvested so that the whaling industry would go on forever. And then, of course, the people who wanted to save the whales influenced the whole situation. And we ended up whaling and nonwhaling. And the environmental nations by and large were nonwhaling nations and wanted to see the cessation of whaling.

Is there anything that I should have asked you that I didn’t or that you would like to add or comment on?

One of the problems I had personally, and I guess Bob White had had a similar problem, was the nature of appointments to senior positions at NOAA. The White House wanted to play a role – they wanted to use politics to reward people who had helped in the election and so on. That is something that I did not understand then but I fully understand it now. It’s a problem. I wanted certain persons and the politicians said, “No way. You’re not going to have this guy. He was a Democrat. You’re in a Republican administration now. There is no way you’re going to let him in, and here is somebody that I would like to put in that spot.”

Bob White had the same problem. Of course, he was the originator of NOAA. So, he managed to have an associate administrator position created. And that was basically his real deputy. I think his name was Jack Townsend. He [Townsend] was … his deputy, whereas the person who signed as the deputy administrator was a politician who was basically ineffective. I had the same thing with Tony Calio and Jim Winchester. These were good people. They just had different orientation on things. They had different opinions. We see this all the time in politics. People that were sincere want to get their way and we don’t quite understand them, whoever they are. They don’t understand us, and why we think the way we do and why they think the way they do. That’s the problem. And that’s what you have in a democracy.