Congress’s Own Think Tank: Learning from the Legacy of the Office of Technology Assessment (1972–1995)

The complex impacts of technology development on society present a unique challenge of how to help the U.S. Congress understand and cope with the implications of technology change in ways that are closely aligned with congressional needs and directly responsive and accountable to Congress. In 1972 the United States Congress established the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) as a small analytical agency to become better informed about implications of new and emerging technologies. OTA ceased operations in 1995, but many researchers and congressional observers assert today that creating a new mechanism or adapting an existing one originally designed for different purposes is needed to fill the void left by OTA’s closure. The OTA history is an important case study in considering future such efforts.

In 1958, in the wake of the 1957 Soviet launch of Sputnik, the House of Representatives formed a new Subcommittee on Science, Research and Development (SRD), which was the first dedicated group in Congress charged specifically with examining the broad implications of science and technology development and related science policies of the U.S. Government. The SRD coined the term technology assessment to describe the means of informing the Congress of the potential undesirable effects of new technology. For over a decade proposals were considered to establish a mechanism for providing science and technology advice to Congress, which ultimately culminated in passage of the Technology Assessment Act of 1972, signed into law by President Nixon on October 13, 1972, creating OTA.

OTA was the first new legislative branch agency formed since creation of the General Accounting Office (GAO) in 1921. OTA’s organic legislation included unique organizational features, including a Technology Assessment Board (TAB), which was created as a bicameral and bipartisan governance structure with equal majority and minority representation of House and Senate members, and a Technology Assessment Advisory Council (TAAC), composed principally of inembers appointed from outside government, the role of which evolved as the agency grew and matured. Throughout OTA’s history TAB remained a central organizational element and was unique among the legislative analytical support agencies at the time—GAO, the Congressional Research Service, the Congressional Budget Office, and OTA. Over time TAB proved essential to aligning OTA’s program of assessments with the Congressional agenda.

OTA began carrying out formal technology assessments in 1974• 7he procedures for organizing and executing them were refined significantly over the agency’s history. Over time most OTA assessments were initiated by the leadership of congressional committees, although the organic legislation provided other means, including a short-lived attempt to create an “OTA Priorities” list. The urgency of the congressional agenda ultimately hastened a marginalization of the role for TAAC, originally designed as a means for providing external input on the design of prospective technology assessments, as well as essentially abandoning one of the original aspirations of the agency’s designers—assessments focused on long term, early warning of the implications of technology change. In the course of the very first of several OTA assessments, the culture of the agency became such that assessments would articulate the strengths and weaknesses of alternative policy options, often in great detail, but would seldom put forward specific policy recommendations.

For any given OTA assessment a great deal of effort went into defining the detailed scope of the work. Since the agency often received more requests than it could accommodate, for prospective topics requested by a congressional committee, the OTA stafi’often consulted with other committees of jurisdiction and interest to be as broadly responsive as possible and to help establish priorities fairly. Formal proposals for assessments were considered by TAB and, if approved, an assessment commenced with funds drawn from OTA’s annual appropriation. Key elements of each OTA assessment included a comprehensive advisory panel of technical experts and relevant stakeholders; a core OTA project team including an experienced project director; contractors selected to support major analytical tasks; in-house research efforts by the project team; workshops convened with additional experts and stakeholders to obtain the most current and accurate information possible; extensive external peer review of draft reports; and dissemination of reports through congressional hearings, briefings, and public release.

OTA’s influence was rarely the sole result of the delivery of an assessment report to Congress. As OTA matured organizationally, the agency’s advice was viewed increasingly as independent and objective, as it was intended to be. While it was often viewed as first among equals regarding unbiased science and technology policy advice to Congress, it often remained but one influence on congressional deliberation. Many observers characterize the principal uses of OTA reports as either “analytical” or “rhetorical.” In the former case the use was to help inform the debate or “shed light on a poorly understood problem” and in the latter case the use was to “build a stronger case for existing policy preferences.” Since OTA did not issue policy recommendations, rhetorical use sometimes was exercised on both sides of a debate. During the late 1970s and 1980s, OTA’s respect and influence grew considerably in Congress and in the science and technology community, delivering assessments on a wide range of topics including health, energy, defense, space, information technology, environment, and many other areas.

The 1994 mid-term congressional elections resulted in a sweeping change in leadership of the 104th Congress. An ambitious Contract with America agenda included proposals for substantial reductions in federal spending, and singled out OTA, by far the smallest of the Congressional support agencies, for elimination as conveniently symbolic. While OTA built up considerable support from both sides of the aisle for its relatively narrow mission in the grand scope of Congress, the lack of a mission fully integrated with a well-established congressional process, a limited constituency among the rank and file members of Congress, a zero-sum game for operating budgets among the legislative branch support agencies at a time of deep budget cutting, and the convenience of being able to claim closure of an entire federal agency while sacrificing less than one percent of the Legislative Branch budget all together presented a perfect storm of forces that OTA and its supporters could not weather. OTA suspended operations in the fall of 1995, although the legislation authorizing the agency was never repealed.

When OTA suspended operations in 1995, a number of existing and new organizations sought to fill the gap. The congressional leadership’s assumption that CRS would take up OTA’s mission never materialized. In 2001 Congress asked GAO to experiment with technology assessment to gauge whether it could fill some of the gap. The experiment has continued although key structural weaknesses remain, such as the lack of a TAB-like structure to establish priorities in allocating resources and to tune to the congressional agenda. Direct connection to the congressional agenda is diluted further by the overwhelming scale of the balance of GAO’s auditing-style work. An expected increase in the use of the National Research Council in the wake of OTA’s closure was short-lived as well. NRC reports are of a different character than that of OTA reports, mainly due to differences in key features of the study processes used to produce them. Finally, cessation of OTA’s operations in 1995 stalled continuing development of technology assessment in the United States, but organizations modelled on OTA flourished in Europe.

Some of the forces shaping the need and character of science and technology advice are identical to the circumstances that existed when OTA was created, and in some cases have grown stronger, such as the accelerating pace of technological change, globalization of science and technology development, a strengthening link between science and technology development and economic growth and welfare, and the increasing role of science and technology dimensions in many, if not even most, issues the Congress faces. Given history and current circumstances, a number of key requirements for an effective source of science and technology policy advice—tuned to the needs of Congress—can be summed up as ensuring that the work of such a source is viewed as (1) relevant and considered of high priority in the Congress, (2) independently arrived at and widely perceived to be so, (3) ideologically balanced and authoritative, and (4) produced with the evidence presented that is transparent and clear in language as well as context familiar to congressional deliberations.

Today it is becoming increasingly more difficult for anyone or even any organization to keep pace with the frontiers of science and technology. Consequently it is becoming even more challenging for Congress to receive useful, relevant, informed, independent, authoritative and timely advice on the science and technology policy dimensions of the issues it faces, but the need is becoming a more frequent plea from the science and technology policy community. Effective science and technology policy advice in the unique policy making environment of the Congress today is perhaps especially complex and the necessary advice is generally not the same as that produced by most other organizations. Creating OTA-like features in existing organizations that would replicate the OTA study process and operate under direct congressional oversight is likely problematic, albeit still possible, in existing congressional organizations such as GAO or CRS, but OTA-like features may also be possible in external organizations such as the NRC, or in reinstating and updating an OTA to current circumstances.