Here's a challenge. Name a government agency that provides us with a better return on our tax dollars than the National Geodetic Survey (NGS). The NGS's cost per year is $20 million, while the benefits almost certainly reach into the billions.

We'll get to some of the benefits in a moment, but first, what is the NGS?

The NGS is our nation's surveying and mapping system. With its help, we can describe the exact position of virtually anything on earth, whether it's a boundary line between two farms, an airplane flying at 500 m.p.h., or a group of Boy Scouts hiking in the wilderness.

Thomas Jefferson established the agency in 1807. Originally he intended that it would map the coastline to make shipping safer. As the Nation grew westward, its mission expanded to include land surveys. Today it still performs these functions, but with the help of computers and satellites, it can do them with a precision that's hard to imagine. Ten years ago, we could determine the location of an object five miles away to within an accuracy of three inches. Today we can locate objects 60 miles away to an accuracy of within of an inch. We can locate any place on the planet within 30 feet.

Why does this matter?

*In farming, it means less pollution. In the past, when tractors went back and forth across the fields applying fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides, the average overlap was 20%. With global positioning, the farmer can decrease the overlap to close to zero. Since he's reducing the total amount of chemicals, he's also reducing the amount that will wash into the nearby waterways.

*In aviation, it means greater safety. Air traffic controllers know the exact location of planes traveling hundreds of feet per second. Having exact reference points not only makes aviation safer, it makes today's large scale aviation possible.

*In shipping, it means more efficiency. The more cargo a ship can safely carry, the better it utilizes its fuel, its time, it's manpower, and its overhead. When a captain can load his ship with additional freight, causing the ship to lie just one inch deeper in the water, that extra inch can easily mean $100,000 to him. The Geo Positioning System can tell him in real time what the effects of tides and winds and even recent rains are on the depth of water in the harbor. He can calculate safe loads with far greater accuracy than he could using the charts that were previously available to him.

*On the Internet, it means faster access to information According to Captain Lewis Lapine, Director of the National Geodetic Survey, the Internet almost reached gridlock back in 1985. The sheer volume of information caused massive traffic jams at the computers that routed information. With Geo Positioning, however, the phone company, was able to attach a timing device to each packet of information so it would wait its turn in line at the switching station. AT&T could do this only because it had extraordinarily precise information on the location of each of the switching stations. Using these techniques makes the current heavy usage of the Internet possible. The impact of this on science and commerce runs into billions of dollars a year.

Americans can be proud of the National Geodetic Survey. It's the world standard for mapping and surveying, and its a service both to us and to the world. Is there an agency that makes better use of our tax dollars?