At a congressional hearing this week, Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) asked an irate and not entirely comprehensible question about his granddaughter’s iPhone. The only problem, as the tech exec who was the hearing’s sole witness explained, is that iPhones are made by Apple but the tech exec was the CEO of Google.
Such ignorance-revealing incidents—and the humiliating headlines and videos that follow—seem to happen whenever Congress tries to tackle some complicated technical subject. But as embarrassing as the gaffes can be, they’re not really the best gauge for the savviness of the legislative branch. Most members of Congress don’t come from a technical background, of course, but on the scientific and technological subjects they most care about, they and their staffs are deeply informed and intensely engaged.
The bigger problem is that Congress as an institution is unequipped to understand and address the large, long-term policy questions raised by advances in science and technology—questions related to, for example, human cloning, the gene-editing technology CRISPR, cybersecurity and our elections, additive manufacturing, the shifting basis of America’s energy economy, the growing private space industry, and robotics and artificial intelligence. While the executive branch employs an enormous number of scientists and technical experts, Congress must rely on staffers—who rarely have the time to concentrate on just one subject, and whose numbers have declined sharply in recent decades—and a few small, in-house support agencies. The lopsidedness confers a great advantage to executive agencies and ill serves the public interest.
It wasn’t always this way. For 23 years—until it was killed off in a spasm of Gingrich-era budget-trimming enthusiasm—Congress had its own in-house agency dedicated to helping it anticipate developments in science and technology, the better to craft worthy legislation. The Office of Technology Assessment was established in 1972, the brainchild of Rep. Emilio Daddario (D-Conn.), who became its first director. The impetus for OTA’s creation was a growing sense in the late 1960s and early ’70s that technology was careening out of control—remember, this was the moment in which the space race climaxed and the environmental movement was born—and that Congress needed to better prepare itself to meet the challenges ahead.
By the time OTA was defunded in 1995, it had put out more than 700 publications—including a few hundred major, book-length reports, called “assessments”—on subjects ranging from nuclear proliferation to wheelchairs to reproductive technologies to the use of virtual reality for combat training. More remarkable than the breadth of OTA’s work, however, was the agency’s methodology. OTA’s roughly 140 staffers weren’t just scientists; they came from many different backgrounds, and so the agency was well equipped to examine its subjects from a variety of technical, economic, historical, and social perspectives. It consulted with an enormous number of outside experts—roughly 2,000 per year—as well as stakeholders from different sides of the issues OTA was studying. And instead of trying to produce reports that offered a consensus view or a single recommendation, OTA tended to offer Congress menus of policy options from which to choose and analyses of the tradeoffs relevant to each option. Many of OTA’s reports were ahead of their time; some are still relevant today.
It is hard to say with exactness how much OTA helped Congress; certainly it is difficult to identify more than a few cases in which an OTA report had a clear-cut influence on legislation. Then again, much the same could be said of the Congressional Research Service, the respected, century-old agency whose duty it is to offer Congress the information it needs to do its work. Besides, as one former staffer told me, the subjects OTA covered tended to be “termites-in-the-basement problems” rather than “wolf-at-the-door problems.” Congress was better off with OTA than without it.
When Republicans won control of both chambers of Congress in the 1994 election, their reform agenda included plans to cut costs in the legislature. (Anyone who worked on Capitol Hill at the time will remember Newt Gingrich giving speeches while carrying a plastic ice bucket of the sort that used to be delivered regularly to congressional offices before he discontinued the anachronistic practice.) And beyond cost-cutting, some Republicans were wary of OTA, believing it to be too closely aligned with Democrats. After all, its biggest booster was Senator Ted Kennedy; its staff was believed to be stacked with liberals; and its reports were believed—not entirely wrongly—to lean toward regulation and intervention in the economy. And so, in a move widely characterized in the press as a self-performed lobotomy, the Republican majority zeroed out the agency’s budget. OTA closed its doors in September 1995.
Recent years have seen a few attempts to fill the void created by OTA’s absence. Most notably, another congressional agency, the Government Accountability Office, has performed on a pilot basis a handful of technology “assessments”—not really comparable in quality to what OTA produced—and GAO recently announced the reorganization of this team to expand and improve upon its work. This is all to the good: Congress can use whatever help is available in understanding science and technology.
There have also been several attempts over the years to revive OTA; these efforts have mostly been led by Democrats, and bringing back OTA is on the agenda for the incoming Democratic majority in the House of Representatives. (The authorizing statute for the agency is still on the books, so bringing back OTA would require just restoring the funding.)
But some conservatives and libertarians have also taken an interest in bringing back OTA—after all, a smarter Congress might not necessarily be one that intervenes more but one that intervenes less clumsily or not at all. Other conservatives, like Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) have taken a related interest in rebalancing our constitutional order by restoring the capacities and prerogatives of the legislative branch. For a stronger Congress, for a smarter Congress, for wiser policy—it’s time to bring back OTA.
