Office of Technology Assessment

Based on Wikipedia: Office of Technology Assessment

The Brain Congress Threw Away

In 1995, the United States Congress did something remarkable. It voluntarily made itself dumber.

For twenty-one years, lawmakers had access to a small office staffed with scientists, engineers, and policy experts whose sole job was to help Congress understand complicated technical questions. Should we be worried about acid rain? What are the real capabilities and limitations of lie detector tests? How might climate change affect American agriculture? The Office of Technology Assessment, or OTA, would investigate these questions for months or even years, producing careful, nonpartisan reports that helped legislators make informed decisions about the technologies reshaping American life.

Then Congress shut it down.

Why Congress Needed Help in the First Place

To understand why the Office of Technology Assessment existed, you need to understand a fundamental problem with democratic governance in a technological age. The people we elect to make laws are, by design, generalists. They're lawyers, businesspeople, teachers, doctors, and farmers. They represent the diversity of American life. But the decisions they face increasingly require specialized knowledge that takes years to acquire.

Consider just a few of the questions Congress has had to address: How safe is nuclear power? Should we invest in fusion energy research? What are the privacy implications of computer databases? How should we regulate genetic engineering? What's the best way to reduce air pollution from automobiles?

Each of these questions has technical dimensions that most legislators simply aren't equipped to evaluate on their own. They can read news articles and opinion pieces. They can listen to lobbyists from different industries. But how do they know who to believe when the science itself is complicated and contested?

This was the gap the OTA was designed to fill. It was meant to be a source of objective, expert analysis that Congress could trust precisely because it had no agenda beyond informing legislators.

How the Office Actually Worked

Congress created the Office of Technology Assessment in 1972 through something called the Technology Assessment Act. The office didn't actually get its first funding until 1974, and it spent the next two decades building a reputation for thoroughness and impartiality.

The governance structure was deliberately bipartisan. A twelve-member board oversaw the office, with six members coming from each political party. Half were senators, half were representatives. This meant that neither party could use the OTA as a political weapon against the other. Both sides had equal say in what the office studied and how it operated.

When Congress wanted to understand a complex issue, the OTA would assemble teams of experts to investigate. These weren't quick one-page summaries. The office produced substantial reports, often hundreds of pages long, that laid out the technical details, the policy options, and the tradeoffs involved in each choice. Over its lifetime, the OTA produced approximately 750 of these studies.

The topics ranged across virtually every domain of science and technology policy. Acid rain. Healthcare delivery. Global climate change. Polygraph testing. The office even pioneered innovative ways to distribute government information, becoming an early adopter of electronic publishing at a time when most government documents existed only on paper.

The Model That Spread Around the World

Other countries noticed what the United States had built. The OTA became a model that legislatures around the world sought to emulate. If the world's most powerful democracy had decided it needed expert technological advice to govern effectively, perhaps others did too.

This is worth pausing on, because it suggests something important about what Congress had created. The OTA wasn't just useful for American lawmakers. It represented a genuine innovation in democratic governance, a new institutional form designed to address a new kind of problem. Other democracies facing similar challenges looked at the OTA and decided it was worth copying.

The Attack Begins

The forces that would eventually destroy the Office of Technology Assessment began gathering strength in 1980. That year, a journalist named Donald Lambro published a book called "Fat City," which identified government agencies he considered wasteful and unnecessary. The Reagan administration, newly arrived in Washington with a mandate to shrink the federal government, looked favorably on Lambro's analysis.

Lambro called the OTA an "unnecessary agency" that duplicated work being done elsewhere in government. This critique would echo through the next fifteen years of attacks on the office.

Was it accurate? The question deserves careful consideration. The United States government is enormous, and many agencies touch on scientific and technical questions. The Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and dozens of other bodies all produce research and analysis. Why did Congress need its own separate office?

The answer lies in the difference between executive branch agencies and an entity that reports to the legislature. When the Environmental Protection Agency produces a report on air pollution, that report reflects the policy priorities of whoever currently occupies the White House. The EPA serves the president. Its scientists and analysts do excellent work, but their work is shaped by executive branch priorities and reviewed by political appointees.

The OTA was different. It served Congress, not the president. Its reports weren't filtered through any administration's agenda. When legislators wanted to know whether the executive branch was telling them the truth about some technical matter, the OTA gave them an independent check.

The Contract with America

The end came swiftly after the 1994 midterm elections. Republicans, led by Newt Gingrich of Georgia, swept into power promising dramatic changes in how Washington worked. Their agenda, called the Contract with America, emphasized cutting government spending and eliminating programs they viewed as wasteful.

The OTA found itself on the chopping block.

According to Science magazine, Republican lawmakers had come to view the office as "duplicative, wasteful, and biased against their party." This last charge is particularly revealing. An office designed to provide objective analysis was being characterized as partisan. But objective analysis doesn't always tell politicians what they want to hear. A report on climate science, for instance, might reach conclusions that conflicted with the positions some lawmakers had staked out. Was that bias, or was it just uncomfortable truth?

When Congress withdrew funding at the end of 1995, the OTA had a staff of 143 people and an annual budget of $21.9 million. In the context of federal spending, this was almost nothing. The entire office cost less than a single modern fighter jet. But in the political context of the moment, it had become a symbol of the government bloat that Republicans had promised to eliminate.

Voices of Dissent

Not everyone in the Republican party agreed with the decision. Representative Amo Houghton, himself a Republican, warned at the time that Congress was making a serious mistake.

"We are cutting off one of the most important arms of Congress when we cut off unbiased knowledge about science and technology."

Houghton's warning captures the essential tragedy of what happened. Whatever one thinks about the size of government in general, eliminating the OTA specifically meant that Congress would have less capacity to understand the technical issues it was being asked to legislate. The money saved was trivial. The capability lost was irreplaceable.

Scientists and scholars outside Congress also criticized the closure. Law professor David Faigman made a detailed case for why the OTA's work had been valuable and why it should be reinstated. Critics saw the decision as an example of politics overriding science, a triumph of ideology over the practical need for good information.

The Idea That Wouldn't Die

The Office of Technology Assessment closed its doors, but the concept of technology assessment proved more durable than the institution. In Europe, the idea continued to thrive. The European Parliamentary Technology Assessment network, known as EPTA, coordinates technology assessment units working for various European governments. The Europeans had learned from the American example, and they kept the tradition alive even after America abandoned it.

This is a fascinating historical irony. The United States invented a new form of democratic institution, one so valuable that other democracies copied it. Then America threw away what it had created while the copies flourished elsewhere.

Meanwhile, within the American government, other entities tried to fill the void. The Government Accountability Office, which is Congress's main investigative arm, eventually established its own technology assessment capabilities. But these were never as extensive as what the OTA had provided.

Periodic Efforts to Bring It Back

The question of whether to restore the Office of Technology Assessment has resurfaced repeatedly in the decades since its closure.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton pledged to work toward restoring the OTA if elected. The following year, Representative Rush Holt of New Jersey, a physicist who understood firsthand what Congress had lost, wrote an op-ed making the case for restoration.

In 2010, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars released a report called "Reinventing Technology Assessment." Rather than simply recreating the old OTA, this report proposed something more ambitious: a nationwide network of nonpartisan policy research organizations, universities, and science museums that could conduct technology assessments for Congress. The proposed network, called ECAST (which stands for Expert and Citizen Assessment of Science and Technology), would include not just expert analysis but also public participation in evaluating new technologies.

The idea of incorporating citizen voices into technology assessment represents an interesting evolution in thinking about how democracies should handle technical questions. The original OTA model relied on expert analysis delivered to elected representatives. The ECAST vision imagines a more participatory process where ordinary citizens help shape how society responds to technological change.

During the 2020 presidential campaign, entrepreneur Andrew Yang became the first candidate to make OTA restoration a centerpiece of his technology platform. Yang's proposal was unusually specific for a campaign promise. He said he would refuse to sign any budget that didn't include funding for the OTA, a commitment designed to force the issue rather than letting it languish as a nice idea that never gets implemented.

The Partial Revival

In January 2019, something significant happened. The Government Accountability Office established a new team called Science, Technology Assessment, and Analytics, or STAA. This team was explicitly designed to take on the technology assessment mission that the OTA had once fulfilled.

STAA grew out of a small pilot program that the GAO had created back in 2002, seven years after the OTA's closure. For nearly two decades, this pilot had operated on a modest scale, demonstrating that the need for technology assessment hadn't gone away. When Congress finally elevated it to a full mission team in 2019, it was an implicit acknowledgment that the decision to close the OTA had left a real gap.

The new team launched with 49 full-time staff members and has since grown to over 100. That's still smaller than the OTA was at its peak, but it represents genuine capability. In October 2019, a report by the National Academy of Public Administration recommended that Congress invest even more in building its science and technology policy capacity.

Why This Still Matters

The story of the Office of Technology Assessment might seem like ancient history. The office closed nearly thirty years ago. Who cares about a bureaucratic casualty from the Clinton era?

The answer becomes clear when you consider the technological questions Congress faces today. Artificial intelligence. Online privacy. Cryptocurrency. Gene editing. Autonomous vehicles. Social media's effects on democracy. Climate change. Pandemic preparedness. Cybersecurity.

Each of these issues is at least as complex as the questions the OTA once helped Congress navigate. Most are considerably more complex. And the pace of technological change has only accelerated. New capabilities emerge faster than legislators can understand them, let alone regulate them wisely.

In 2022, technology writer Jamie Susskind argued publicly for bringing back the OTA specifically to address questions about artificial intelligence and online privacy. Security expert Bruce Schneier called for a similar body focused on cybersecurity, which he proposed calling a National Cyber Office.

These aren't fringe voices. They're serious thinkers grappling with a genuine problem. How can a democratic legislature make good decisions about technologies that its members don't understand? How can it evaluate competing claims from industry lobbyists, advocacy groups, and executive branch agencies when it lacks the in-house expertise to tell good analysis from bad?

The Deeper Question

Beyond the practical question of whether Congress should restore the OTA lies a deeper question about democratic governance in a technological age.

We ask legislators to make binding decisions about matters that require deep expertise. We expect them to set policy on nuclear energy, biotechnology, artificial intelligence, and climate change. We want them to protect us from the dangers of new technologies while not stifling beneficial innovation. And we want them to do all this while also handling the traditional business of government: budgets, taxes, defense, social programs, foreign policy.

It's an impossible job if legislators have to acquire all this expertise themselves. But it's also a dangerous job if they simply defer to whoever sounds most confident or has the most money to spend on lobbying.

The Office of Technology Assessment represented one answer to this dilemma. Give Congress its own capacity for technical analysis. Staff it with experts who serve the legislature rather than the executive branch. Make it bipartisan so neither side can weaponize it. And let it produce honest assessments even when those assessments are politically inconvenient.

This answer may not be the only one possible. Perhaps there are other institutional arrangements that could serve the same purpose. Perhaps the STAA team at the GAO will eventually grow into something that matches what the OTA once provided. Perhaps new models of citizen engagement and distributed expertise will prove even better than a centralized office.

But the need that the OTA addressed hasn't gone away. If anything, it has grown more urgent. The technologies reshaping our world are more powerful, more complex, and more consequential than anything the original OTA ever studied. The gap between what legislators need to understand and what they actually understand grows wider every year.

A Cautionary Tale

The story of the Office of Technology Assessment is ultimately a cautionary tale about short-term thinking in politics.

Eliminating the OTA saved $21.9 million per year. In a federal budget measured in trillions, this was a rounding error. The political benefit was real but fleeting: Republicans got to claim they had cut wasteful spending and eliminated an agency they believed was biased against them.

The cost, however, has compounded over nearly three decades. Every year that Congress operates without robust technology assessment capability is a year when legislation might be written based on incomplete understanding. Every time lobbyists make claims about some new technology that legislators can't independently verify is an opportunity for bad policy to become law.

We can't know with certainty what would have been different if the OTA had survived. We can't point to specific laws and say they would have turned out better. But we can observe that Congress regularly struggles to understand the technologies it's asked to regulate. We can note that other democracies maintained their technology assessment capabilities while America abandoned its own. We can see that the need the OTA was created to address has only grown more acute.

In 1995, Congress decided it could govern a technological society without a dedicated capacity to understand technology. Three decades later, we're still living with the consequences of that decision.