OTA victim of politics, budget cuts

By Fred W. Weingarten
CRA Staff

Who needs technology assessment? Apparently not Congress--it closed down its Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) after only 20 years of existence (see story on Page 5). Others, myself included, are not so sure. I believe the nation will sorely miss an important experiment in incorporating a better understanding of technology into government policy making.

It isn't considered good form these days to speak well of a government agency or to suggest that the government can do something right. Nevertheless, I have always had great affection and respect for OTA; I spent nearly 10 years there, many of them as manager of the Communication and Information Technologies Program.

The budgetary attacks on OTA began shortly after the Republicans gained control of Congress. In January, a Senate task force suggested, in a list of ways to cut the legislative budget, that OTA be eliminated. This summer, the House Appropriations Committee, in its legislative appropriations bill, provided zero funding for the agency. On the floor of the House, after some confusing parliamentary manipulation, an amendment to save OTA was barely passed.

The strategy for saving the agency was odd and hardly consoling to supporters. The bill buried OTA administratively in the Congressional Research Service and funded its operations by offsetting cuts in Library of Congress services and in public information activities of the Government Printing Office. This strategy meant Senate opposition to OTA would come from anti-OTA and budget-cutting forces and, indirectly, from certain sectors of the public-interest community concerned with preserving public access to government information.

Floor actions in the Senate designed to save OTA failed. Opposition stemmed from the Appropriations Committee, especially from the legislative subcommittee chaired by freshman senator Connie Mack (R-FL), who had led hostile hearings in the spring.

The question many might ask is: Why would Congress close down a small agency dedicated to helping senators and representatives do their jobs better? The most obvious reasons don't seem plausible.

One might eliminate an agency that was ineffective or incompetent. That didn't seem to be the case with OTA. Like any organization, OTA had its occasional failures and slipups, but they were rare. It had a solid track record of high-quality, influential reports.

Another excuse might be that the reasons for having OTA were no longer valid. That explanation is even less believable, unless technology has, unnoticed by most of us, become less important to our society and to policy issues.

I suspect OTA was brought down by a combination of three factors:

1) The inherent vulnerability of its mission. Bipartisan analysis that serves no special interests at the expense of others makes no political friends and creates a lot of enemies over time. Some Republicans also suspected OTA was a Democratic institution in its heart of hearts, a suspicion that was hardened when its director, John Gibbons, and several members of the analytical staff took jobs with the Clinton administration.

2) The political need in Congress for a blood sacrifice. Members of Congress, who have been trying to eliminate executive branch agencies, felt pressure to show they could do the same to themselves.

3) A changed political climate that places less value on policy analysis. According to press reports, House Speaker Newt Gingrich recently quoted in a speech Mao Tse-Tung's dictum that politics is war without blood. According to that view, important political choices are shaped not by reason or by careful analysis of options, but by the clash of ideology and raw self-interest. So who needs a think tank?

OTA was formed on a rationalist view of policy making: that careful analysis of issues, trends and policies could improve the quality of legislative debate. Its genius was to transform a detached, academic style of policy analysis into a form that could be woven into the real-life, combative and emotional political process Gingrich referred to.

In a sense, OTA had invented a discipline. The agency was formed when concern about the unintended and unexpected impacts of technology was high, and the government, particularly Congress, seemed to be confronted with increasingly complex issues involving technology. A new field of study, called technology assessment, had begun to spring up in US and European universities and think tanks. In Europe, it took a more negative rhetorical tone, antagonistic to technology. In the United States, it developed with a more pragmatic, analytical field, identifying threats and looking at opportunities and how to capture them. The National Science Foundation established a small program of research support in technology assessment that focused on building methodology for long-term assessment. This program was eliminated several years ago but should be revived.

OTA, however, was not an independent think tank or academic policy research center. Its survival depended on providing a service to its congressional clients, and it took a while for the office to find its footing. In searching for an identity during its first few years, it went through three stages, the first two being dismal failures.

At first, OTA was run somewhat like a partisan and politicized congressional committee, under the leadership of an ex-member of Congress. OTA then adopted the guise of a blue-sky, long-range research agency. It took less than a year to learn that Congress had little interest in long-term, theoretical speculation about the future. Sentiment for closing OTA began to grow.

Then OTA found its niche--conducting fairly long-term analyses of the impacts of short-term decisions. The agency forged a pragmatic compromise between the rigor and depth of academic policy research and the needs of its political clients for quick, readily understandable answers. It invented a new analytical style, one that made numerous contributions to the public-policy debate.

OTA's studies were conducted in the public spotlight. Through advisory panels, workshops, contractor reports and reviews, OTA was able to tap the most knowledgeable people in the country on any topic it studied. Project staff made a particular effort to identify representatives of key stakeholders and bring them into the study at an early stage.

The nation will miss OTA. Looking just at information technology, how can one ignore that we are in the middle of a huge, complex technological change that is confronting politicians with a myriad of difficult issues? The same situation exists in biotechnology, materials, energy and a host of other technologies.

Gingrich--and Mao--may be right in their belief that "politics is war." But successful generals always want to understand the terrain on which they are waging the battle. Congress has just closed down a pretty effective map maker.