Flunking Science

Washington Monthly, Jan, 2001 by Julie Wakefield

Congress shot itself in the foot when it killed the OTA. Will Republicans bring it back to life?

TODAY NO ONE DENIES THAT TECHNOLOGY plays a central role in the economy, foreign policy, and our daily lives. There's genetically engineered food on our plates, cell phones attached to teenage ears, smart bombs searching for targets, and e-everything everywhere. That trend is reflected in action on Capitol Hill, where most bills contain at least inklings of science, medicine, or technology. Somehow, we have faith that our elected officials are up to the task of mastering all those issues and making informed decisions.

That might be an easy job for a polymath like retiring Sen. Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.), but what about Rep. Steve Largent (R-Okla.), a former wide receiver for the Seattle Seahawks? How does former aerobics instructor Rep. Mary Bono (R-Calif.)--wife of the late Sonny--get up to speed on the latest ripples in nanotechnology before voting on the defense appropriations bill?

Most likely, they turn to interest-group lobbyists for a crash course on whatever issue is at hand. Or they read a few Newsweek articles collated by their staff and hope that the leadership looking for their votes understands the issues better than they do.

Few members of Congress have the educational background for understanding many of the complex issues now coming before them. In the wake of the November election, the number of members with science and technology training stands at an all-time high of 24, but that only constitutes five percent of the Congress. Not surprisingly, when it comes to issues of science and technology, Congress' educational deficit is frequently glaring.

Before a recent budget hearing on the National Science Foundation, for instance, Rep. Vernon Ehlers happened to bump into a Republican colleague. He informed Ehlers of his intent to whack the appropriation, grumbling, "NSF has no business funding automatic teller machines and gambling." Fortunately, Ehlers, whose doctorate in physics comes from University of California at Berkeley, quickly set him straight, explaining "ATMs and gaming theory" actually referred to Asynchronous Transfer Mode, a coding scheme in communications, and to mathematical approaches to probabilistic analysis. Those two hot research areas were more in tune with NSF's mission, but without intervention from Ehlers, his colleague would have put them out.

Of course, the nature of democracy ensures that there will always be morons in Congress. But for those thoughtful legislators who recognize the gaps in their knowledge yet want to make educated decisions for the country, there's not much help out there. No single agency is charged with cultivating the minds of Congress on complicated issues that rise above the average highway-funding bill.

It hasn't always been like that. For more than 20 years, lawmakers seeking impartial analyses on emerging trends could turn to the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), an agency once dubbed the "national defense against the dumb." In its heyday, the 143-member congressionally chartered agency published, on average, 50 in-depth reports a year on subjects from biotechnology to global energy, and it was widely praised for its insightfulness and ability to explain all sides of a debate without picking one.

But in 1995, OTA became a casualty of the Republican "Contract with America," as House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and his minions sought to kill off an entire agency to demonstrate that they were serious about shrinking the government. Gingrich, the self-described futurist, apparently didn't see much past the midterm election when he led Congress to disband its own technology think tank just as the country was experiencing an unprecedented high-tech boom. But the revolutionaries' failure to distinguish between smart government agencies and superfluous ones has hurt Congress. OTA filled a critical need, and no viable alternative has arisen to adequately plug the knowledge gap left in its absence.

Since OTA's demise, Congress has grappled with issues ranging from the Internet explosion to biologically engineered corn to the ethical implications of Dolly the cloned sheep--and the effects have been hit and miss.

"In order to vote intelligently or craft legislation, you must understand science and technology, and understanding scientific trends in this fist-moving world of ours is very difficult," admits Rep. Amo Houghton (R-N.Y.), whose family founded Corning, the nation's leading fiber optics company, 150 years ago. "I mean, I can vote on anything, but I can vote like an idiot."

Fortunately, some members of Congress are considering reviving the old OTA in some form or another. If history is any indication, though, the push for such an agency promises to be an unnecessarily partisan battle--one that won't draw much support from industry, whose influence on members of Congress might be muted if members had an outlet for unbiased information.

But if the party of President George W. Bush is really serious about showing its moderate, smart side, passing a bill reauthorizing the OTA would be a good place to start. As former OTA Director John H. Gibbons points out, "If you take the simple truism that science and technology now dominate our lives and our nation's future, that alone should tell you that those who are charged with governance need the capacity to access national wisdom in their formulation and decision making on public policy. And without OTA or its equivalent, they are in the dark without a floodlight."