Assessing OTA's legacy: examining what remains, now that OTA is gone - Office of Technology Assessment abolished by Congress

Science News, Oct 28, 1995 by Janet Ratoff

Four weeks ago, Congress did the unthinkable. It abolished one of its four service agencies--a low-budget, prestigious research center renowned for its thorough analyses of technology and its impartial assessments of the public policy options that stemmed from that technology.

Today, in a small storefront building six blocks east of the U.S. Capitol, a skeleton crew packs up what's left of this Office of Technology Assessment (SN: 10/7/95, p.228). They're hoping to archive its documents--correspondence to and from federal legislators and some 750 reports prepared at Congress' request over nearly a quarter of a century.

To many, this is the sum of OTA's legacy.

But not to Michael G. Norton, director of the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology in London. "There are five European equivalents of OTA. And I think it's fair to say all were motivated by the example of the U.S. OTA and have, to a greater or lesser extent, drawn on [that] model for their design and objectives."

Ironically, he notes, last month--during the very week OTA was closing up shop--the European Parliament voted to make its fledgling technology assessment agency in Luxembourg permanent.

Closer to home, some 20 to 25 veterans of OTA held a meeting last week under the auspices of several Washington, D.C.-area technology policy institutions. They're investigating the possibility of reconstituting some small, privately funded vestige of OTA--to be called the Institute for Technology Assessment (ITA).

Explains Vary Coates, who has been spearheading the venture, "we would like to preserve the core institutional memory and culture of OTA in hopes that it will be refunded at some later time--or that we can find alternative sources of funding to continue its work in the public interest."

None of these organizations that hope to carry on in the tradition of OTA appears close to duplicating what was lost. For instance, even if ITA finds the $500,000 to $1 million a year it seeks to spring into action, it will not have the financial independence that helped safeguard OTA from conflicts of interest.

Most European centers, with 6 to 10 full-time analysts, are a fraction of OTA's former size. And "although OTA served as a model for the European organizations, in practice--and sometimes in principle--this model has not been followed," observes Josee van Eijndhoven, director of the Rathenau Institute in the Hague, the Dutch OTA.

That's largely because the organizations that evolved abroad were tailored to serve parliaments.

Though parliaments can write legislation, they rarely do so, explains van Eijndhoven. Instead, government ministries tend to both write and execute public policy. Moreover, government officials and the majority of members of parliament often belong to the same party--working together to exert their will over that of smaller, opposition parties.

As a result, says Bruce Bimber of the University of California, Santa Barbara, "parliamentary legislators lack the imperative for independence and ability to conduct their own analysis that Congress has."

Christine Mironesco, a political scientist at the University of Geneva, agrees. "The division of power [between those who make and execute laws] is a European idea which has always been more successful in America." In a book due out next year, she argues that the greater the separation between those powers, the more likely a federal technology assessment organization is to be successful.

Her research also suggests other complications. For one, she maintains that many technology assessment studies performed on her side of the Atlantic are less objective than OTA's have been. They either fall into boosterism, extolling a technology's benefits, or take a moralistic tone, focusing on its inherent risks.

"In many ways," argues Bimber, who is also completing a book on OTA, this agency "was a uniquely American institution."

Politicians have never lacked information. If anything, they're deluged with facts, opinions, and recommendations--usually delivered by people with a vested interest in their use. What legislators have always sought is some sieve to filter out ungrounded claims and to identify the often competing desires of major interest groups that should be considered while shaping technology-dependent policies, be they tax credits for private research investments or patent rights for gene fragments that may be used in disease diagnosis (SN: 9/4/93, p.154).

Harvey Brooks, now professor emeritus at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, chaired a panel for the National Academy of Sciences in 1969 that wrote the paper which served as the basis for OTA's design.

In retrospect, says Brooks, bipartisan oversight probably proved OTA's most important feature. The House and Senate were represented equally on OTA's governing board, as were Republicans and Democrats; the chairmanship rotated frequently. This makeup required OTA's analysts to take a stance squarely in the middle of any issue. That's "one reason the agency achieved fairly high credibility, both with the public and Congress," notes Brooks.