How to Assess the Future's Technologies
"What you really need, Congressman, is a house inspector"
For 20 years, Congress had a dedicated “Office of Technology Assessment,” or OTA, meant to provide Congress with an unbiased assessment of science and technology. The OTA was touted as a key tool to keep the American government ahead of the curve on the most important issues of the future.
But in 1995, after Republicans swept into power, the OTA was shuttered. Its critics claimed it was a partisan entity, unfocused, and frequently too slow to help Congress. Today, some observers want it back, to inform Congress on issues like generative AI, gene editing, and quantum computing.
How valuable was the OTA, actually? Today, we talk to Peter Douglas Blair, former Assistant Director of the OTA, and author of the 2012 book Congress’s Own Think Tank: Learning from the Legacy of the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment.
What You’ll Learn
Why don’t congressmen read?
What role did the OTA play in deregulating the power industry?
Does Congress still need a dedicated OTA?
Why are agencies killed?
When the OTA was first proposed, management guru Peter Drucker said the agency was guaranteed “to be a fiasco.” Where was he coming from?
I'm not sure. I think most observers of the time, including Peter Drucker, presumed that an agency like OTA would not survive in a highly partisan environment. And, arguably, that ultimately proved to be the case. But over its 23-year history, it navigated the cross-currents reasonably well and functioned as a pretty useful resource as the role of science and technology grew in the congressional agenda and public policy debate. Because of the highly partisan environment we’re in at the moment, I think that Drucker's observation is probably even more apt today than it was then.
What was happening in Congress at the time that made an Office of Technology Assessment seem so necessary?
There were several major forces at work. The general one I just described: the role of science and technology became increasingly important across the congressional agenda. At the time, Congress was concerned that it was being left out of such issues by the executive branch. In fact, until the early ‘70s, Congress largely ceded jurisdiction over science and technology issues to the executive branch.
Coming out of the Cold War, the role of government in science and technology was increasing as well; how to do that responsibly became a major issue before the Congress. The committee deliberations that went on in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s ultimately concluded that there was a way for Congress to design an institution that could help it play a role in fashioning the nation's S&T agenda.
You've written a great monograph on that design and the history. Will you tell us a little bit about which features of OTA's design made it work?
There were several. I think one was the overwhelming focus on its balance between the two chambers of Congress and making it a bicameral institution. Another was the high priority of trying to stay out of the values-based part of the debate. OTA focused on informing the debate rather than making policy recommendations that would require incorporating information beyond the assessment.
To clarify, it made no policy recommendations, right?
Except for its very first assessment. I think the OTA saw the writing on the wall that that was probably a mistake. In all future assessments, it did not make recommendations and instead focused on articulating possible consequences. I suppose some people would argue that recommendations could be gleaned from how they presented the consequences of alternative options, but I don’t think that was the intention. The intention really was to look at the strengths and weaknesses of alternative options in a broader context than other organizations typically did: focusing on S&T but incorporating the broader dimensions of a policy debate as well.
Tell me more about the products that OTA created. What were the outcomes?
They changed over the years. Initially, the stock and trade was the document called a technology assessment, which was typically a broad-based look at an area that had dominant S&T features. The assessment report was the principal deliverable. There was a fairly elaborate process for initiating OTA assessments, acquiring the expertise to inform the assessments, staffing them to produce the results, and disseminating the findings. But over the years, the increasing inventory of assessments allowed the agency to build on them with narrower, deeper dives into particular areas.
For example, in the ‘80s, the agency did a big study on the prospects of deregulating the electric power industry, which led to growing the transmission and distribution system across the country. One of the concerns was the degree to which the increased electromagnetic magnetic fields from the added transmission lines would affect the environment, so follow-up studies were initiated to look at those issues. And similar things happened across the board — with healthcare, defense, and other environmental issues.
So there were facilities for doing so-called background papers that helped inform debates. Those might've been the result of a workshop. There were also special memoranda that elaborated on a policy option or updated information related to an assessment. Those all happened over time. But the technology assessment itself was still the principal deliverable of OTA assessment teams.
Were senators and representatives actually reading these reports?
I would say that their staff read them more than they did. There were some senators who actually read OTA reports — the one-page summaries were affectionately called “Senator-sized summaries.” The agency spent an enormous amount of time trying to distill the principal messages into packages that would actually be read by senators. Some staff, particularly on the committees that commissioned the studies, devoured the OTA assessment reports and reported the results of their reading to members.
That was less often the case in the individual members’ offices. That ultimately became one of the key vulnerabilities of the agency, that its constituency was largely vested in the committees and not in the rank-and-file members.
There's a great quote in Adam Keiper’s write-up of the OTA, where a staffer asks if the one-page summary can be double-spaced for the Representative.
I remember both double-spaced as well as larger font.
Congressmen are busy!
In the early ‘80s, it became much more feasible to do double-sided pages, so a one-pager actually had additional information, charts, graphs, and references on the back.
On the structural side, OTA originally had the power of subpoena, but it never used it. Why not?
When the agency was building to its peak level of influence in the ‘80s, many of the members of the Technology Assessment Board (TAB), which oversaw the OTA, were already chairs of the standing committees in the House and Senate. I included in the monograph a table from 1988, when the chairs of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, the Foreign Relations Committee, and on the House side, the Energy and Commerce and Science and Tech committees — most of the committees involved in science and technology issues — had members on the TAB. They probably collectively felt that it was an overreach for OTA to invoke subpoena power.

Truth be told, whenever we needed information and agencies were reluctant to provide it, we could call on the board members to help. If necessary, they could issue a subpoena on behalf of the standing committee rather than OTA itself.
What kind of information would an agency be reluctant to provide?
Often, purely technical information about the structure of a government R&D program, or potentially useful results of an analysis. When I was running the energy program, there were many R&D programs that kept track of the cost and performance of alternative technologies. It would have been much more efficient for us to use that information than to go out and try to reinvent the wheel to acquire it. Even if an agency program manager was reluctant to provide it, we usually prevailed.
Will you tell me a little about how management was structured? My impression is that a lot of OTA’s work was outsourced.
When the agency began, it was envisaged that the work would principally be done by contractors, and there would be a very small staff to coordinate the contract studies. And several of the early studies were indeed carried out that way. There was a core permanent staff of 140-odd members that was divided into programs. But their principal role was to actually write the reports and use the contractor's input to assemble them. Over time it became clear that it was important to cast OTA reports in language that was more accessible to congressional committees and members.
Were initial reports by contractors not accessible enough?
Yeah, they weren't. They were written as largely technical reports and generally didn't incorporate the broader context of the congressional decision-making challenges. They were written at a level of abstraction that congressional staff could not absorb easily, so they needed translators to read the report. The agency needed to make technology assessment reports more useful to the Congress, both in terms of additional policy context and in helping to explain highly technical stuff in a way that policymakers could understand.
And I'm assuming you saw a rise in OTA's influence with Congress as those reports got more accessible?
Indeed, I think that was very much the case. Of course, it depended a lot on the topic and timing. One of OTA's principal challenges was getting something done in time to be useful to the Congress, so you had to anticipate the agenda and launch an assessment if the committees were interested. Sometimes, the stars aligned, and an OTA report became very influential.
I'm thinking of one from the late ‘80s when Congress was debating how to implement the Clean Air Act. There were a lot of tradeoffs inherent in that topic, so the House Energy and Commerce Committee and the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee had a lot of questions to evaluate. After OTA’s initial assessment report came out, the staff became, as Senator Stevens used to call them, the “shared staff feature of the OTA.” They were seen as a resource that both sides of a committee could call upon for initial modeling related to what they found in the assessment: Say, whether or not particular provisions in a bill would affect a given state.
OTA tried to get ahead of the curve on upcoming Congressional issues by developing a “priorities list.” Tell me about that attempt and why it didn't work out.
If resources become limited, there is an inherent tension in deciding between what to do in anticipation of the agenda, vs. what the committees want done now. Governor Peterson, who was the second director of OTA, wanted to return the agency to more of a foresight function. So he launched this priorities effort, which produced a fascinating list that was considered by TAB. Again, a lot of committee chairs sat on the TAB and they decided that this undermined their ability to get what they wanted done. With a limited set of resources, one was going to take priority over the other.
I think Governor Peterson's initiative was perhaps an overreach. He wanted to move the agency primarily in that foresight direction, rather than to balance between what the committees wanted and anticipating what was going on. Jack Gibbons tried to split the difference when he became director and develop ways in which the agency could be more prepared. For example, he elevated the role of the Technology Assessment Advisory Council (TAAC), a group of external advisors, and tasked them with helping structure and staff OTA to anticipate the agenda. But TAAC didn't actually initiate assessments. Now, there were exceptions, and sometimes even those became somewhat controversial for the TAB, since they knew that it was a scarce resource that had to be allocated.
Are there cases of that foresight work paying off? Were there projects OTA tackled that ended up being practically useful for committees?
The electric power study that I mentioned earlier was actually, in part, a foresight activity. The agency and the board recognized that the electric power industry was undergoing enormous turmoil, and the nuclear power industry was in disarray because of cost overruns and the way nuclear power was regulated at the state level. There was insufficient transmission, and new alternative technologies were on the horizon.
OTA, partly through informal urging of the committees, was trying to prepare for that future and began to study the potential deregulation of the industry. The formal question posed was, “Would the system fall apart if we deregulated it?” The agency found that, “No, you'd have to do it carefully, but technically you could navigate an industry with increased competition.” And that is indeed what happened.
I remember Congressman Dingell being particularly appreciative because he was the monkey in the middle of this problem; the utilities were screaming at him, saying that the industry was going to fall apart. There were only a handful of electric utilities advocating for increased competition, which would theoretically reduce costs considerably.
Congress benefited enormously from OTA's contribution in that particular area. OTA was pretty early in the climate change debate, in healthcare, and in biotechnology, too.
In 1984, a controversial OTA report on President Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) was written by then-professor Ash Carter [who later became Secretary of Defense]. OTA then produced official, critical assessments on SDI in 1985 and 1988.
That set of three reports was very badly received by the Reagan administration and congressional Republicans. How big of a role did those reports play in OTA's later shuttering?
I don't think it was the most significant factor in its demise. Those who didn’t look into how the reports were produced thought it was due to partisan bias. I was there at the time, and it was certainly not that — the OTA reports were largely a technical debate. Ash’s first issue was a background paper. That background work was very important in shaping the ultimate assessment report, but it was very narrowly conceived as, “Would SDI work?”
At the time, the evidence was pretty clear that, as envisioned initially, it wouldn’t. There could have been a lot of reasons for issuing the report other than investigating whether those technical issues could be resolved, but at the time there was a widespread perception that it was a partisan deliberation. But I don't think it was ultimately the reason why the agency fell to the ax.
What were the reasons it fell to the ax then?
There were several. One I mentioned earlier was the lack of a constituency among the rank-and-file members. OTA’s constituents were largely the leadership of the standing committees. So when there was a big turnover in the Congress, as there was in the 104th when a third of the membership changed, the brand new members didn't know what OTA was, didn't care, didn't think it was important. The leadership changed and they were unfamiliar with the history of the agency and its role.
If OTA were to be reconstituted, one of its challenges would be to develop that broader support. I suggest a number of ways it could be done in the monograph, but that was one of the major issues: at a political inflection point for the Congress, OTA was left without a strong constituency.
Another reason was symbolic. The Contract with America specified many reductions in the support service agencies. I think GAO lost close to 1000 people — I forget the exact number, maybe it was 700, but it was an order of magnitude more than OTA [NB: Between 1992-1998, GAO’s headcount was reduced by 39%]. OTA was maybe 1% of the legislative branch budget, but Contract with America proponents could claim that they cut an entire agency for a 1% reduction in the budget. It was very convenient to be able to do that, and some members didn’t feel the agency was important anyway.
Lastly, the timeliness issue, which I think all supporting agencies struggle with, was a problem for OTA. One possible exception is the CRS, which does more off-the-shelf work, but even they get criticized for being slow sometimes. All of the other sources of advice have the same problem. I worked at the National Academies for 20 years, and we suffered with that issue constantly, maybe more so than at the OTA.
Does your view differ from Jack Gibbons's? He said, “Should OTA ever return to Congress, it will not necessarily be safe. Certainly not if its studies repeatedly prove inconvenient to vested political interests.”
That suggests OTA died because of an explicit political battle, rather than because it was unhelpful, or not worth the cost.
I think today that very well could be the issue, but at the time, I'm not sure that it was. Today, the partisan divide is deeper than it was even then. And some values trump the issues of the time, so I think I agree with Jack now. By the way, when was that quote from?
That was 2005.
Yeah, that wasn't 1995. In the 1990s, particularly at the committee level, there was still some degree of bipartisan cooperation in crafting legislation. Today that's a really rough road.
Newt Gingrich had a couple of criticisms of OTA. On the one hand, he called OTA “a staff-driven bureaucracy made up largely of liberal Democrats that was giving Congress inadequate and often bad advice.” But he also had a nonpartisan critique: "There are lots of ways for members to get scientific advice directly from scientists and not from staff.”
I want to ask you about that second point. Back then and today, are congressmen getting scientific advice directly from scientists? If they’re not getting it from OTA, where are they getting technical expertise?
They are getting plenty of advice, lots of advice, often from scientists and organizations. The question is, what kind of advice? When I came to the National Academies, I became very aware of the different kinds of advice that go to the Congress. We had the best and the brightest scientists in the world, but many conversations between a Nobel Laureate and a member of Congress were he said, she said. In my second monograph, I talk about how the advice that is most effective for Congress is independent, objective, relevant, timely, and actionable.
In 2005, I was in a hearing on this subject, and Congressman Rohrabacher posed the same issue to me that Mr. Gingrich did in your quote. At the time, California was undergoing an enormous housing crisis. There were many problems, and I said, “What you really need, Congressman, is a house inspector. Somebody independent who can assess all of the information that's out there, assess its quality, tune it to the needs of the Congress — all of the things that OTA did that other organizations and individuals are not doing now.”
I spent a few years at Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Honor Society, which has chapters at many universities around the country. We experimented with a science advisory function, whereby members of individual chapters would develop relationships with their congressional representatives. It was much more likely that scientists would be received well in a congressional office in their own district. That worked out in some instances, but it took enormous effort to train scientists to communicate effectively with a congressman and to convey useful, substantive information. I think that's the distinction that Newt missed completely there: yeah, you can get information from scientists, but what kind of information are you getting? That's the role that OTA really provided.
That makes sense. When a lay observer like me looks at all of Congress's tools for technical insight — the National Research Council, the National Academy of Sciences, the Intergovernmental Personnel Act, and CRS — my first instinct is to ask, “Is there a niche for OTA that’s not already filled?”
Let’s take AAAS as an example — which is one of the most successful, by the way — where scientists come in sponsored by the professional societies and become science advisors in members’ offices or in committee offices. Similarly to my experience with the science advisory function that Sigma Xi tried to do, those scientists go through an enormous transformation. Going from the bench to becoming aware enough of the legislative context when providing science advice is a heavy lift. In terms of getting science advisors to fill that role, sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't.
CRS uses off-the-shelf information and acts as an advisor on individual issues, which has proven enormously effective for the Congress, but it's not necessarily at the cutting edge of an issue. If a lot hasn't been published on the topic, you need to convene a bunch of experts to assemble that information and make an assessment based on the current context. CRS does that every now and then, but that was basically what OTA did. I think GAO is also trying to do that, but it has had challenges fulfilling that aspiration.
Let's say you're brought in tomorrow to decide how to fill this gap. With the benefit of retrospect, would you push for a new standalone OTA, or would you house it somewhere else?
It would have to be conditional. I would certainly support reinventing the function within one of the existing agencies, whether at GAO or maybe even CRS.
But I do think it would be easier just to start over; since the agency's actually already authorized, all you have to do is appropriate the funds. Even so, the agency would have to be very different than it was a quarter of a century ago. The context for how it would function has changed, the needs have changed, and the access to advice and expertise has improved. There would have to be a lot of changes, but the basic structure is there and could be built upon. You could do it either way. Unfortunately, the features that gave strength to OTA assessments, like peer review and access to expert staff and external advisors, are not getting realized in the GAO function.
Tell me a little bit more about how a new OTA would have to change — what features would you add or take away from that original mandate?
First and foremost, technology could help address structural weaknesses. CRS and OTA could collaborate to build a network of information that would be much more accessible to rank-and-file members, rather than just to the standing committees. Communicating as we are now [Zoom] and other forms of electronic information gathering were not available to OTA then; it would make the process much more efficient and hopefully much more timely. A lot of technical information is much more accessible. You could access the best expertise, prepare the results, and disseminate them much more efficiently. That would be a major change for the agency.
That collaboration could also be useful to the agencies themselves. GAO is very good at auditing the performance of a science and technology program, but a collaboration between an OTA function and the GAO would be much more effective than either one doing it alone.
There are some other potential structural changes. With staffing, the idea could remain the same. A core staff with supplemental rotational staff was very useful. But you could have another dimension with consulting staff, a much broader network of professionals dispersed throughout the country to get the most current information.
In a revitalized OTA, would you recommend quicker turnarounds for reports or smaller products?
It would need to be a blend. I think OTA's goal when it was closed was to have a family of products. In some instances, a full assessment report is necessary, but the trend at the time was to try to peel off more narrowly defined things that could be done quickly.
You could supplement that portfolio with smaller standalone issues, but I don't think you should eliminate the technology assessment function entirely. When transformational change is happening, having a pretty comprehensive assessment of what's going on is extremely useful for congressional deliberations. So having a blend of short, on-demand, CRS-like reports and full technology assessments would be much more beneficial.
Imagine a young and hungry congressman who says, “I get the vision here, but the internet has changed all of this. I can access all the things for which I would go to CRS in another era. I can make my own judgments as to the motives and interests of the funders. Thanks, but no thanks.”
What would you say to them?
That's certainly the view of some. I think that if the goal is to absorb information and trust that it is independent, objective, and authoritative, relying on the Internet alone is a pretty risky way to do it. As the artificial intelligence boom hits us, what you find on the Internet may or may not be useful. And do you have ways of assessing the usefulness of that information? So having someone be responsible for assessing the quality of the information you use to make a policy decision is important.
Speaker Gingrich asked a reporter in 2004, “Why would you put a filter between you and a scientist?” In that sense, he was prescient about the societal trend of people turning away from middlemen and trying to get their information directly.
Are you bullish on the possibility of a future OTA or a better technical assessment in Congress, or does this make it all harder to lift now?
At least right now, I think it's somewhat problematic, but largely because of the partisan divide. That is, can there be bipartisan support for analysis that both sides could respect? In the long run, science and technology will overwhelm many issues. Because society will be more dependent on science and technology, it will oblige the Congress to find ways to better inform itself, and in a way that is less subject to the partisan forces that will push it one way or another.
On that question of foresight and predicting trends in science and technology and what Congress will want to take up in the near future: how could a new OTA do that better? If you came in as director, how would you tackle that challenge?
One way would be to reinvigorate the TAAC function of oversight of the agency, building on Jack Gibbons’ objective to ensure the agency is well-positioned for foresight and acquiring expertise. You always have to navigate the tension between what the committees want and foresight assessments, but assuming there were the resources, then something like the priorities list could be useful.
One of the things I've mused about was having an annual report on the state of science and technology and the issues facing the nation. Maybe one of the committees would ask the agency to do it, or the agency would initiate it. That could be done by the OSTP or maybe the Academies. An OTA-like organization could keep Congress in the loop so we wouldn't have instances like when Mark Zuckerberg testified before Congress and was asked completely uninformed questions.
Anything else I should have asked you or that we've left on the table?
One interesting comparison between OTA and the other support agencies is how the staff are appointed. The staff in OTA were much more like congressional staff, basically at-will employees. You could change the staff to suit the topics that it faced, whereas the other support agencies have developed much more civil service-like structures, making it much more difficult to change in response to a changing agenda. This becomes problematic for the staff since there may not be a place for you anymore as priorities change, but in an area like S&T, it allows for agility.
Thanks to Rita Sokolova for her judicious transcription edits.
Thank you! This was such a fantastic read. I appreciate hearing about the issues that OTA faced and some of the solutions, as well as headwinds which contributed to the demise of the office. I wonder what Peter Blair might think of the STAA at GAO: is it providing a similar service? How well is it conducting a similar role to what OTA did? Is this something you discussed? https://www.gao.gov/about/careers/our-teams/STAA