LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
No doubt independent expertise still exists. Congress can turn to the Congressional Research Service, for example, or the National Academies of Sciences, Medicine, and Engineering. Other federal entities, such as the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Science and Technology Policy, have advised the executive branch (and still existed as we went to press). “But they’re not even necessarily specialists,” Calo says, “and what they’re producing is very lightweight compared to what the OTA did. And so I really think we need OTA back.”
What exists today, as one researcher puts it, is a “diffuse and inefficient” system. There is no central agency that wholly devotes itself to studying emerging technologies in a serious and dedicated way and advising the country’s 535 elected officials about potential impacts. The digestible summaries Congress receives from the Congressional Research Service provide insight but are no replacement for the exhaustive technical research and analytic capacity of a fully staffed and funded think tank. There’s simply nothing like the OTA, and no single entity replicates its incisive and instructive guidance. But there’s also nothing stopping Congress from reauthorizing its budget and bringing it back, except perhaps the lack of political will.
“Congress Smiles, Scientists Wince”
The OTA had not exactly been an easy sell to the research community in 1972. At the time, it was only the third independent congressional agency ever established. As the journal Science put it in a headline that year, “The Office of Technology Assessment: Congress Smiles, Scientists Wince.” One researcher from Bell Labs told Science that he feared legislators would embark on “a clumsy, destructive attempt to manage national R&D,” but mostly the cringe seemed to stem from uncertainty about what exactly technology assessment entailed.
The OTA’s first report, in 1974, examined bioequivalence, an essential part of evaluating generic drugs. Regulators were trying to figure out whether these drugs could be deemed comparable to their name-brand equivalents without lengthy and expensive clinical studies demonstrating their safety and efficacy. Unlike all the OTA’s subsequent assessments, this one listed specific policy recommendations, such as clarifying what data should be required in order to evaluatea generic drug and ensure uniformity and standardization in the regulatory approval process. The Food and Drug Administration later incorporated these recommendations into its own submission requirements.
From then on, though, the OTA did not take sides. The office had not been set up to advise Congress on how to legislate. Rather, it dutifully followed through on its narrowly focused mandate: Do the research and provide policymakers with a well-reasoned set of options that represented a range of expert opinions.
Perhaps surprisingly, given the rise of commercially available PCs, in the first decade of its existence the OTA produced only a few reports on computing. One 1976 report touched on the automated control of trains. Others examined computerized x-ray imaging, better known as CT scans; computerized crime databases; and the use of computers in medical education. Over time, the office’s output steadily increased, eventually averaging 32 reports a year. Its budget swelled to $22 million; its staff peaked at 143.
While it’s sometimes said that the future impact of a technology is beyond anyone’s imagination, several findings proved prescient. A 1982 report on electronic funds transfer, or EFT, predicted that financial transactions would increasingly be carried out electronically (an obvious challenge to paper currency and hard-copy checks). Another predicted that email, or what was then termed “electronic message systems,” would disrupt snail mail and the bottom line of the US Postal Service.
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