Commentary: The dream of a more science-savvy Congress refuses to die

Every couple of years, a few lawmakers try to revive the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), a tiny but influential piece of the legislative bureaucracy that was forced to close shop a quarter-century ago in a fit of muscle flexing by a newly ascendant Republican Congress. The OTA’s sole purpose was to provide lawmakers with forward-looking assessments on a broad array of technologies.

Last year Representative Bill Foster (D-IL), the Hill’s lone PhD physicist, and a few allies in the House seemed to edge a bit closer to reopening the OTA’s doors. Unfortunately, their efforts were thwarted in the newly passed fiscal year 2020 appropriations legislation , due in large part to the findings of a congressionally chartered review.

A November report from the nonprofit National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) rejected the OTA’s revival in favor of bolstering the legislative branch’s existing science and technology (S&T) staffs at the Congressional Research Service (CRS) and the Government Accountability Office (GAO). To help build “the absorptive capacity of Congress,” the report also called for the establishment of an “Office of the Congressional S&T Advisor” made up of S&T-literate staff to House and Senate committees with S&T oversight responsibilities. The S&T adviser would report to and lead a coordinating council that would include representatives from the CRS, the GAO, and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Confused yet?

During its 23-year life, the 200-person OTA produced nearly 750 full assessments, background papers, technical memoranda, case studies, and workshop proceedings. Topics covered the gamut: defense, energy, transportation, agriculture, health care, space, environmental impacts of technology, trade agreements, and many others. Each peer-reviewed assessment provided multiple policy options that Congress could choose to pursue. Outside consultants, contractors, and workshop organizers typically provided input to the in-house staff.

By comparison, the GAO, which is the legislative branch’s auditing and performance assessment arm, has produced 18 technology assessments in the 17 years it has been performing them. The NAPA report found differing opinions on whether the quality of the GAO work was equal to that of the OTA.

In a political gesture, lawmakers voted in 1995 to kill the OTA, which had a budget of under $25 million. Having just recaptured the House majority after 40 years, Republican lawmakers were eager to show constituents they meant business about cutting government waste, and they offered up the OTA as a duplicative appendage of a bloated legislative bureaucracy. Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ), like Foster a PhD physicist, tried for 10 years to revive the OTA. Holt, now retired, says he had observed firsthand how helpful and relevant the OTA had been when he worked as a science fellow on the Hill prior to his run for office.

The OTA was bipartisan, guided by a bicameral board that comprised equal numbers of members from both sides of the aisle. Its nonpartisan take on issues was often in evidence when OTA reports were cited by both an issue’s defenders and its detractors. Many of the reports the OTA produced were considered authoritative in the broader scientific community.

But many Republicans perceived a Democratic bias in the OTA. In particular, they saw a partisan bent in the office’s skeptical assessments of President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), particularly Excalibur, the nuclear-pumped x-ray laser hyped by Edward Teller and his protégés at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

The partisan divide over the OTA has endured. At a 5 December hearing of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, Rep. Bill Posey (R-FL) referenced a 1984 Heritage Foundation report that accused the OTA of having leaked sensitive information about the SDI. Foster said that reading the OTA report on the SDI “could have saved taxpayers $25 billion on Reagan’s unworkable dream.”

Although $6 million was included in the FY 2020 House appropriations bill to begin restoring the OTA, the final House–Senate compromise measure contained nothing. Conferees instead added $40 million to the GAO’s budget, including an unspecified amount to hire additional S&T staff. They did not create the S&T adviser office recommended by the NAPA report. Meanwhile, the OTA remains on the books, sans funding.

Although the CRS, GAO, and National Academies each have filled some of the void left by the OTA, structural gaps remain. The CRS is tailored to provide quick-turnaround analyses from in-house experts, and it has never aspired to fill the OTA’s role, former assistant OTA director Peter Blair told the hearing earlier this month. The GAO has been slow to build that capacity, said Blair, who is now a top staffer at the National Academies. Michael McCord, who was a member of the NAPA panel, noted that the GAO is fundamentally designed to look backward, not to assess what may lie ahead. And the National Academies’ business model is devoted primarily to serving the needs of federal agencies, which pay for their work.

As the NAPA report pointed out, scientific training is extremely rare among lawmakers: Currently only 17 of 535 members have a background in a field related to S&T policy (not counting physicians and other medical professionals). Staffs of key committees have been shrinking, and low pay encourages an S&T brain drain from Capitol Hill.

The fact that Congress has done without the OTA for 25 years weighed heavily in the NAPA panel’s decision to advise against the office’s reincarnation, said McCord. But we’ll never know if lawmakers might have devoted more attention to climate change and other major S&T issues had they received more of the comprehensive, nonpolitical scientific assessments that the OTA once provided. Whether that function can be fully restored without a stand-alone entity remains to be seen.