Time
to Reeducate Congress About Science and Technology
By M. Anthony Mills
RealClear
Science -- December
06, 2019 -- Political momentum is building to revive the Office of Technology
Assessment (OTA), a congressional agency that once provided lawmakers with
nonpartisan technical expertise. Presidential candidates Elizabeth Warren and
Andrew Yang have even made reviving the OTA planks of their platforms, with
Yang making a plug for the OTA during the fifth Democratic debate.
Although there have been efforts to
reopen or re-imagine the OTA since its closure in 1995, Capitol Hill has been
abuzz this past year with proposals to get Congress up to speed on science and
technology (S&T). In the fall of 2018, Congress directed the Congressional
Research Service (CRS) to contract with the National Academy of Public
Administration (NAPA) to study the issue, intimating that Congress may actually
mean business. The NAPA report, released shortly before the Thanksgiving
holiday, offered recommendations for whether and how to strengthen Congress’
“technology assessment” capacity and to improve S&T expertise in Congress
generally.
What is technology assessment, and does
Congress really need it?
The term “technology assessment” dates
to the 1960s when lawmakers, and members of Congress in particular, became
increasingly concerned about their inability to grapple effectively with the
challenges and opportunities posed by modern technology. The result of these
debates was the Technology Assessment Act of 1972, which created a new congressional
agency whose primary purpose would be “to provide early indications of the
probable beneficial and adverse impacts of the applications of technology and
to develop other coordinate information which may assist the Congress.”
Part of Congress’ motivation in creating
the OTA was to ensure the legislature had its own unbiased source of expertise,
thus decreasing its dependence on the executive branch. This was part of a
broader effort in the late 1960s and early 1970s to strengthen Congress and counterbalance
the power of the executive. It was hoped that the OTA, in particular, would
allow Congress to take ownership of technical matters that had become
predominantly the purview of executive agencies. As one representative put it0,
although members of Congress “are not scientists ... in our system of
government we have our responsibility. We are not the rubber stamps of the
administrative branch of government.”
With a bipartisan structure and no
lawmaking power of its own, the OTA evolved over time into a respected support
agency alongside CRS, the Congressional Budget Office and the Government
Accountability Office (GAO) that offered members and committees nonpartisan
advice about technical matters ranging from biotechnology and defense research
and development to Alzheimer’s disease and transportation. The OTA’s primary
output was its technology assessment reports — cross-disciplinary,
peer-reviewed studies on technical subjects initiated by congressional
committees and the OTA’s bipartisan Technology Assessment Board. Crucially,
these reports did not make policy recommendations, although they did indicate
the costs and benefits of various policy approaches to the technical issues at
hand.
Congress’ own “think tank” operated
until 1995, when it was defunded by congressional Republicans as a part of Newt
Gingrich’s Contract with America. The move was primarily symbolic — the OTA’s
budget was little more than a rounding error by federal standards — showing
Congress’ willingness to shrink government. Ironically, however, it may have
helped grow the administrative state by hampering Congress’ ability to conduct
meaningful oversight of expert agencies in the executive branch, much less
legislate on urgent technical matters.
While cheerleaders for the OTA have made
calls to bring back the agency for decades, some of the OTA’s functions have
since been lodged elsewhere in Congress. In particular, a 2002 appropriations
bill allowed the GAO to initiate an experimental technology assessment program,
which became permanent in 2008. GAO has recently redoubled its efforts in this
area and hopes to expand its Science and Technology Assessment and Analytics
group to as many as 140 staffers to be on par with the OTA in its heyday.
The NAPA report, for its part,
recommends leveraging existing congressional support services, including GAO
and CRS, rather than reviving or recreating the OTA. The authors suggest that
GAO’s technology assessment program can provide the kind of deep, probing
analysis that OTA reports used to offer, while CRS can, with adequate
resources, offer faster-response advice to members of Congress on whatever
S&T issues concern them. Meanwhile, a new Office of the Congressional
Science and Technology Advisor can “serve as Congress’ S&T ombudsman,
coordinating disparate pools of S&T expertise within the Congress and
outside the Congress.” The details of how such a new office would operate — and
the political hurdles that would have to be overcome in order to create it —
are still to be determined.
Other scholars remain skeptical that
existing institutions, such as GAO or CRS, will be able to provide the kind of
service that the OTA offered Congress at its best. Details aside, there appears
to be an emerging consensus that the Constitution’s first branch is
ill-prepared to tackle some of the most pressing challenges of the day and that
it will need more and better technical resources to do so.
Democrats have been leading the OTA
charge so far, but there are good reasons for Republicans to join the fight, as
my colleague Zach Graves and I have argued elsewhere. At a moment when left and
right have become preoccupied by the ethical and social implications of
emerging technologies — from Big Tech and cybersecurity to automation and
biotechnology — as well as the dangers posed by executive power, conservatives
and progressives alike should support efforts to equip Congress with the tools
it needs to weigh the positives and negatives of emerging technologies and to
deliberate about what actions to take, if any. While this would not be a silver
bullet, the alternative — the status quo — is to leave such political questions
to unelected experts within the executive branch.
M. Anthony Mills is Director of Science
Policy at the R Street Institute.
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