Tech policy could be smarter and less partisan if Congress hadn’t shut down this innovative program

Imagine if Congress had a clear-eyed guide to the technological upheavals shaping our lives. A team of in-house experts who could have flagged the risks of generative AI before ChatGPT went public, raised alarms about deepfakes before they flooded social media, and assessed the vulnerabilities in U.S. infrastructure before ransomware shut down pipelines.

For a time, Congress had exactly that, in the form of the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA). But lawmakers shuttered it 30 years ago, and we’re still feeling its absence today.

Created in 1972, the Office of Technology Assessment gave Congress something it almost never has: a reliable way to understand the science and technologies reshaping the world. The office’s reports didn’t tell lawmakers what to do. Instead, they laid out the risks and the benefits (so cleanly that members on opposite sides of an issue could wave the same report to make their case). The OTA was overseen by a 12‑member board, split evenly between Democrats and Republicans, with equal representation from the House and the Senate. In just over two decades, it produced over 750 studies, on everything from Alzheimer’s to automation.

“It was an impartial repository of interdisciplinary experts who would proactively assist Congress in understanding emerging technology,” says University of Washington law professor Ryan Calo, “and to do so at a time early enough in its life cycle that it had not become full of special interests that had not grown around it, like barnacles.”

But not everyone was pleased with OTA’s body of work. In 1980, Washington Times reporter Donald Lambro published Fat City: How Washington Wastes Your Taxes, arguing that the agency often focused on issues championed by Senator Ted Kennedy and other liberals. In his view, OTA’s studies were “duplicative, frequently shoddy, not altogether objective, and often ignored.” (Lambro’s criticisms were, ironically enough, arguably quite partisan: True, OTA sometimes revisited issues already studied by other agencies, but a 1977 Government Accountability Office (GAO) review noted that OTA’s output made “significant contributions in areas of concern to Congress.”)

That sentiment carried into the Reagan era. OTA’s sharply critical assessments of President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). Pitched at the height of the Cold War as a revolutionary system of space‑ and ground‑based weapons capable of intercepting Soviet missiles in flight, SDI struck supporters as a technological moonshot. OTA’s assessment was a splash of cold water: the office warned that the program’s staggering cost and ambitious scope offered little assurance it could actually shield the nation from a Soviet attack.

Those findings triggered intense political backlash, including from the Heritage Foundation, which in 1984 accused OTA of letting politics override objectivity, claiming that at least one division had prioritized discrediting SDI over providing balanced analysis. The report also argued that flaws in the study and the release of sensitive information were unlikely to be the result of simple mistakes or misunderstanding, concluding: “The evidence that some OTA staffers oppose the Administration’s Strategic Defense Initiative seems clear and compelling.” (Several subsequent independent reviews echoed OTA’s assessment of SDI.)

The controversy continued when North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms used the SDI dispute to condemn the agency outright. “OTA has been obsessed with proving that President Reagan’s strategic defense initiative is both wrongheaded and dangerous,” Helms said in 1988.

The political pressure only intensified as the partisan tides shifted. During the 1994 midterm elections, Georgia Representative Newt Gingrich vowed that if Republicans took control of Congress, the Office of Technology Assessment would be on the chopping block. Once his party indeed did sweep into power, Gingrich (now ascended into the role of House Speaker) made good on that promise: In 1995, with a staff of about 140 and an annual budget of roughly $21 million (“a rounding error in terms of congressional budgets,” Calo says), OTA was quickly defunded, effectively shuttering the office.

The move drew swift criticism even from within Gingrich’s own party. New York congressman Amo Houghton, for example, lamented, “We are cutting off one of the most important arms of Congress when we cut off unbiased knowledge about science and technology.” 

Shuttering OTA solved a partisan problem in 1995, but it left Congress flying blind on science and technology, a gap it has never truly closed.

There have been a number of attempts to resurrect OTA, but none have succeeded. House Democrats have floated funding proposals, including a 2019–2020 effort to allocate $6 million to restart the office but these measures died in the Senate. In the meantime, Congress has tried to fill the OTA-sized hole with alternatives like the Government Accountability Office’s Science, Technology Assessment, and Analytics (STAA) unit. But while this setup offers some basic technical support, critics argue it lacks OTA’s mission-driven focus and deep multidisciplinary expertise, and thus produces far fewer insights than its bureaucratic forebear. “They do not have anything like the capacity that the OTA had,” says the University of Washington’s Calo.

The stakes of that void are becoming increasingly clear. Take, as an example, large language models: An office like OTA could have assessed the risks, outlined guardrails, and prepared Congress before the tools reached the public. Without that kind of early guidance, lawmakers are left reacting after the fact, often leaning on industry lobbyists or outside experts.

“In the absence of OTA, there’s, regrettably, been quite a bit of soft capture by the tech sector,” says Jonathan Mayer, a Princeton computer scientist and former Justice Department science and technology advisor. “And it’s easy to make the ‘oh, you silly Congress, if only you understood the technology, you’d realize the error of your ways’ type argument when Congress lacks the technology expertise to respond.”

Bruce Schneier, a security technologist and lecturer at Harvard University, argues that the most damning consequence wasn’t just the loss of OTA itself—it was what the closure signaled about Congress. “It was an early example of ideology trying to shut down facts,” he says. And what we’re left with, he argues, is a tech policy landscape that is shaped largely by lobbyists. “Which is not good,” he adds, “because it comes with an agenda.”

https://www.fastcompany.com/91378299/office-of-technology-assessment-closed-thirty-years-ago?partner=rss&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=rss+fastcompany&utm_content=rss