Over the next 23 years, OTA studied some of the most controversial and technically intensive issues of its time, winning national and international acclaim. Its reports on topics such as climate change, education, energy, environmental protection, food production, health, national defense, telecommunications, terrorism, and transportation, among many others, addressed issues before almost every Congressional committee.

When the Republicans took control of both Houses of Congress in 1994, Congress voted not to fund OTA for the next fiscal year, and the agency ceased operations in September 1995. Yet it was not abolished. The Technology Assessment Act of 1972 remains on the books, so all it would take to restart OTA would be an appropriation. Whatever the reasons for OTA’s defunding during that contentious and volatile transition 15 years ago, it did not constitute a referendum on the agency’s overall value or competence.

Today, Congress still lacks a dedicated capability to analyze scientific and technological issues, even though they undoubtedly play a greater role in public policy than they did forty years ago. As a result, not only is Congress handicapped in its ability to deal with the critical technological components of current policy issues, but it is also poorly suited to anticipate the significance or the implications of emerging technologies.

Simply put, Congress pushed OTA’s “Pause” key in 1995. It’s time to press “Play” once again.

A Comprehensive Record of Achievement and Integrity

Over its history, OTA informed members of Congress and their staffs and helped shape legislation. But its reports played a far wider role. Since they explained complicated technical concepts to a non-technical audience, they were widely circulated, attracting considerable public attention. “The Office of Technology Assessment does some of the best writing on security-related technical issues in the United States,” said the journal Foreign Affairs. OTA has “produced hundreds of policy-related reports, and has developed a reputation for objective, non-partisan, and comprehensive assessments of public policy issues with highly technical aspects,” according to the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Critical review of OTA reports from both public and expert audiences amplified their message and validated their value and quality.

Ironically, the scientific community’s strong support for OTA may have created the false impression that OTA primarily served to support scientists. This is like saying that television weather announcers primarily serve to support professional meteorologists—which is, of course, precisely backwards. Meteorologists already know the weather. The role of television weather announcers is to take meteorological forecasts, turn them into language the rest of us can understand, and enable us all to make better plans. The scientific community supported OTA not because it benefitted scientists directly, but because it enabled members of Congress to make better decisions about policy issues with significant scientific and technological components.

OTA’s unique value derived from its authoritativeness and credibility.[1] Its position within Congress gave it authority: OTA was overseen by a Congressional Board and worked on studies requested by Congressional committees. This vantage point ensured the relevance of OTA’s work and elicited the cooperation of outside parties. It also came with the recognition that nobody elected OTA to make policy decisions. As a result, OTA made no policy recommendations, but rather offered a range of policy options that were consistent with its technical findings.

OTA won credibility by ensuring that its studies were technically accurate, analytically sound, and balanced with respect to stakeholder interests. All major OTA studies relied on advisory panels of experts who served as sources of information, guidance, and critical review. These panels included top substantive experts, who helped assure the studies’ technical and analytic quality, and individuals representing the different interests at stake, who were sensitive to the balance among competing views.

Objectivity in an Intensely Political Environment

In an environment as intensely political as the U.S. Congress, perhaps OTA’s greatest challenges were to insulate itself from political pressure and to minimize any biases in its own operations. These responsibilities fell to its Congressional oversight body, the Technology Assessment Board. TAB’s voting members consisted of six senators and six members of the House of Representatives, evenly split among majority and minority parties no matter what the composition of either chamber. This balance made TAB the most bipartisan Congressional committee possible. TAB selected the OTA director and approved the initiation and the release of OTA’s major reports. TAB’s composition ensured that the agency served as a shared resource, that its workload was not dominated by some committees over others, and that its reports did not advantage certain political parties or interests.

Restarting OTA

The argument to restart OTA is overwhelming.

The argument to restart OTA is overwhelming. At a February meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Harvard Kennedy School Professor Emeritus Lewis Branscomb argued that technical understanding is much more critical to public policy today than it was when OTA was defunded in 1995. He also pointed out that in the light of global competition—and the growing scientific, engineering, and management strength of China, India, and other rapidly growing economies—the American economy is more dependent than ever on innovation.

Congressman Rush Holt (D-NJ), in a statement prepared for the same AAAS meeting, put it more succinctly: “When OTA was disbanded, Congress gave itself a lobotomy. Our national policies have suffered ever since.”

Since the demise of the OTA, Holt also noted, no entities have been able to assume OTA’s place as the provider of scientific and technical assessment and advice to Congress. Understanding the technical aspects of policy controversies may not resolve them—but it is an absolute prerequisite for wise policymaking.

Moreover, the arguments against restarting OTA are weak:

OTA was too slow. OTA was sometimes criticized for not meeting legislative needs in a timely way. But this accusation was selectively applied and often irrelevant. Reports could be done rapidly when Congressional timelines required it.[2] However, Congress already had the Congressional Research Service and did not need a second agency to do quick turnaround research. OTA’s primary mission—looking comprehensively at the consequences of new technologies and synthesizing alternate policy options to deal with them—required a complex, dispassionate analysis not tied to short-term political imperatives. Pathbreaking efforts, particularly when there was little existing work to draw on, took time and yielded commensurate benefits. Such studies built the base from which OTA could respond rapidly to related requests.

A look back shows that rather than being late, OTA had considered many issues with depth and perception long before they came to the general attention of legislators. For example, after the September 11 attacks and the anthrax letters of the following month, members of Congress (and many others) reached for the 1993 OTA reports on “Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction.” Similarly, OTA reports from the early 1980s and 1990s pioneered the ideas enacted into law last year in the Genetic Information Non-discrimination Act of 2008. Congress frequently returned to major issues that had technological and scientific components—and when it did, an OTA report would often be waiting.

OTA was politically biased. Bias is in the eye of the beholder. It would be astounding if, out of the nearly 750 publications OTA produced over its 23-year history, none had ever been challenged on these grounds, particularly given that almost every topic OTA addressed had ardent advocates on all sides. But most external observers found no overall justification for such allegations. OTA’s practice of making all its unclassified reports available to the public was the best way to uncover bias, and its oversight by a strictly bipartisan Congressional Board was the best way to defend against it.

Members of Congress can just call on scientists directly, or go to the Internet, for scientific advice. Former Speaker Newt Gingrich criticized OTA for interposing non-expert staff between members of Congress and top scientists. Although members of Congress can certainly reach out to scientific experts, that hardly replaces OTA.

The OTA model, honed over 23-years of serving Congressional and national needs, has been proven.

First of all, interactions with individual experts can be rigged by the politically based selection of experts. More importantly, as George Mason University science policy expert Christopher Hill told the AAAS meeting earlier this year, Internet sources such as Wikipedia can provide information that is rapidly updated and community-vetted, but they cannot perform the type of integrative, multidisciplinary analysis that is necessary to address today’s policy concerns. Policy debates don’t hinge on the kind of information that any technical expert or web site—no matter how eminent or accurate—can impart in single interchange. As Hill told the AAAS crowd, Congress is not particularly interested in the melting point of bismuth.

OTA’s process was far richer. It tapped the nation’s expertise in the full range of technical and policy disciplines, placed that information in policy context, evaluated the significance of knowledge gaps and uncertainties, formulated and analyzed policy options, and communicated its results in ways that non-scientists could understand. This process was very much a collaborative and interdisciplinary enterprise, and it added value far beyond any number of one-on-one interactions with experts.

There’s Not a Moment to Lose

The OTA model, honed over 23-years of serving Congressional and national needs, has been proven. Nobody would argue that OTA was perfect. However, the Technology Assessment Act has turned out to be an amazingly flexible document, and any needed improvements can be done within its scope. The agency’s structure, as defined in 1972, remains appropriate today.

Conversely, legislatively reauthorizing OTA in order to rename it, redefine its mission, or dramatically change its governance structure is likely to be an extended, multi-year process, as was OTA’s creation. Together with the possibility of politically-motivated legislative roadblocks, a reauthorization would be unlikely to succeed, killing any near-term hope of reestablishing a technical advisory mechanism for Congress.

Even winning an appropriation for OTA will not be easy. At a time of economic crisis, government spending that is not for the purpose of economic recovery faces extraordinary funding pressures. But the costs of making technically inappropriate policy choices vastly exceed the cost of thinking things through.

OTA knew how to provide scientific and technical advice in a way that was directly translatable to Congress.  We just need to restart it.

Gerald L. Epstein is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former OTA staffer.

Notes

[1] This section draws on Epstein, Gerald L. and Carter, Ashton B., “A Dedicated Organization in Congress,” in M. Granger Morgan and Jon M. Peha, eds., Science and Technology Advice for Congress (Washington, DC: Resources for the Future Press, 2003), pp. 157-163

[2] For example, in 1995, OTA provided Congress with an analysis of the National Space Transportation Policy within 4 months, from request to delivery.

Science, Cultured

Science Progress contributing editor Chris Mooney surveys the interactions between science, politics, and culture from Los Angeles, California. He is author of two previous books, The Republican War on Science and Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming. He blogs at The Intersection with Sheril Kirshenbaum. (Photo: flickr.com/sarahfelicity)

When I started writing for Science Progress a year ago, I wasn’t sure what kind of publication would materialize. True, I had some idea of the kinds of arguments I myself would contribute—being known, among other matters, for discussing political interference with science and the problem of science communication—but it wasn’t clear where the broader experiment would go.

At its one year anniversary, however, I can honestly say that in my opinion, this site—regularly featuring the work of Rick Weiss, Jonathan Moreno, and numerous other insightful contributors—ranks among the very best sources of timely, rigorous, and intellectually serious science policy thinking on the web.

To see that, let’s peruse some of the important threads that have been pursued here over the last year, to give a sense both of the extensive scope and of the quality of analysis. I want to talk about five themes in particular that have recurred at Science Progress: how to restore science advice to the next president and next administration, including revitalizing the role of science in the federal government; the parallel importance of science in Congress; the challenges facing young scientists in America today, especially in the context of concerns about preserving our scientific competitiveness; the knotty but crucial problem of science communication; and the future of the life sciences.

In the wake of an administration that failed to make science a priority, Science Progress writers have worked to outline a better, healthier course for next president to take. Ranging from my own parsing of the National Academies’ advice for the next administration—most notably, that it must quickly appoint a presidential science adviser who can restore the prominence of this role—to bioethicist Art Caplan’s attempt to put six pressing science policy concerns on the administration’s radar (hint: we have to do far more than simply resolve the stem cell issue), you might say Science Progress has provided a cheat sheet concerning what to do, and what to pay attention to, should you happen to be running a government that actually wants to heed the “reality-based community.” Of foremost importance to that government will be having scientists on hand and allowing them easy access to the president and other top policymakers, not only to advise on the issues of the moment but also to provide foresight—so that the issues of the future, like synthetic biology or geoengineering, won’t take anyone by surprise.

And as with the administration, so with Congress—the House and Senate haven’t exactly been science-friendly places of late, but that can and must change. First, there’s the needed but long-delayed solution of bringing back the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, discussed in this column by Darlene Cavalier. But there’s also the imperative to get more science-friendly members of Congress elected to begin with, so as to improve the scientific literacy of the body from within. We must pursue multiple strategies simultaneously to increase the resonance of science for the average legislator, so that he or she can see that science underlies many or even most important issues handled in Congress and, indeed, directly affects voters back home.

The advancement of scientific research isn’t the same as progress in scientific outreach and communication, and the science community has traditionally privileged the former and given short shrift to the latter.

Science Progress has also been an important outlet for analysis on what is arguably the most visible issue in science policy today: How to ensure ongoing U.S. competitiveness in the face of challenges from emerging science superpowers like India and China. But while authors writing here certainly wouldn’t argue that such competitiveness concerns should be ignored, they have brought out an important sub-theme that has all too frequently been neglected: Namely, that if we want to compete in the broadest sense of the term, simply producing more scientists isn’t enough. For after all, note Science Progress contributors Sheril Kirshenbaum and Beryl Lieff Benderly, we already have staggering numbers of talented young postdocs stuck in holding patterns, without nearly enough academic jobs awaiting them. There is a constriction of opportunity for the youngest scientists in America, and if we want to remain competitive, that’s just as serious an issue as the total number of scientists and engineers we’re producing.

Another important, related wrinkle has been the argument that international scientific competitiveness, alone, may not be enough. For while the United States must continue to excel in research (and let us not forget that our nation still leads the world in science), it’s entirely possible for laboratory science to thrive even as the influence and relevance of science, in policy and to the average citizen, decline. In other words, the advancement of scientific research isn’t the same as progress in scientific outreach and communication, and the science community has traditionally privileged the former and given short shrift to the latter. And so a recurring theme here has been that scientists must study the modern media, and engage in outreach to other important sectors of society. Moreover, such outreach must go beyond simply lecturing about the facts, and come to include broad public engagement on equal footing with non-scientists—as Rick Borchelt and Kathy Hudson argue—which is the only way to break down the walls between the experts and everybody else, rather than reinforcing them.

Such rapprochement will be particularly critical going forward as we watch science generate a deeper and deeper understanding of ourselves. Today genetic research is bringing us ever closer to a world in which being able to sample each individual’s DNA will trigger personalized medical solutions tailored to a given arrangement of base-pairs; even as burgeoning neuroscience work is explaining more and more about how we actually come to be the creatures we are, from the brain up. Ongoing, rapid progress in such fields will raise a host of new ethical concerns and has great potential to alarm the public by calling into question traditional concepts of identity, free will, morality, and obligations between generations. Once again, Science Progress has become a leader in analyzing the bioethical challenges implicit in these unstoppable new discoveries.

We live in a paradoxical time. One the one hand, it’s one in which science is changing our world more than ever before, and matters to policy and individual lives more than ever. Yet at the same time, it has become increasingly difficult to get science on the radar of politicians, the media, and the public, and to make it resonate. In this context, Science Progress plays a unique role as a connector between scientific research and the policy and public process—a task that’s now more vital than ever, and that will only grow more so in 2008 and beyond.

Chris Mooney is a contributing editor to Science Progress and the author of two books, The Republican War on Science and Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming. He blogs on The Intersection with Sheril Kirshenbaum.

There is no American progress without science progress.

We entered the scene against a backdrop of deep concern. Was our government truly committed to policymaking based on the best available evidence? Did elected officials appreciate that not a sector of a modern society can be sustained without constant efforts to innovate, that the very future of the country hangs in the balance? Is there freedom of speech for those appointed to protect the public from disease and improve their prospects of a society that promotes human flourishing?

Now, to top it all off, the current financial crisis is not reassuring about the future of funding for research and development, either by government or the private sector.

It will be years before we know whether we have turned the corner on these worries. Nonetheless, there is reason to believe that a serious conversation has begun. The ScienceDebate 2008 movement did not result in a presidential debate on science policy, but it did stimulate renewed interest in the importance of getting these issues on the radar at the highest levels of our leadership. Several major organizations have published analyses and recommendations for enhancing the role of White House science advice, and there is buzz about reviving some version of the congressional Office of Technology Assessment. The organized scientific community is making a greater effort to communicate with the public, including an increasing number of public events.

It seems to us that the movement to put the direction of American science back on the map is quickening and, through our contributors and readers, Science Progress has become part of that movement. We are pleased that traffic to our site has steadily increased over the year, as have subscribers to our weekly email. But the most important measures of our success are the dynamism and intelligence of our articles and blog posts and the feedback we receive from readers around the country. Besides several highly visible panels at the Center for American Progress and the National Press Club, we have helped sponsor such events as the World Stem Cell Summit. Several weeks ago Science Progress columnist Chris Mooney and I participated in a science policy panel at Ole Miss, as part of the run up to the first presidential debate. And of course the first hard copy of Science Progress was widely distributed to science policy experts in Washington, and we have organized a group of experts on financing science and technology to advance our understanding of the elements needed to promote regional centers of innovation.

We are excited about the new opportunities to make our case that will come with a new administration and a new congress. And next year Bellevue Literary Press will provide us with another way to reach the public with the first book to emerge from Science Progress. You can expect to hear more about this project, entitled Science Next, in 2009.

I’m very grateful to the people who do the heavy lifting, especially assistant editor Andrew Pratt and editorial director Ed Paisley. Kit Batten and Mike Rugnetta are two CAP staffers who guide and write for us, and we scored a real coup in recruiting the wise and experienced science reporter for The Washington Post, Rick Weiss, as a regular columnist along with Chris Mooney.

Ultimately, it was the leadership of the Center for American Progress, especially CAP’s president John Podesta, who took what we think was a winning gamble on this endeavor. Like our contributors and readers, they know that there is no American progress without science progress.

Jonathan D. Moreno is the David and Lyn Silfen University Professor and Professor of Medical Ethics and of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and Editor-in-Chief of Science Progress.

Effect Measure wonders if the unpublished CDC study reporting that up to 50 percent more Americans have HIV than we thought was just another victim of the administration’s suppression.

Michael Stebbins posted on Scientists and Engineers for America’s blog about the new, searchable OTA archive and included a video of Rush Holt talking about why OTA was awesome.

JR Minkel on Scientific American comments on a study (which is hotly contested by the IMF) that finds a correlation between IMF loans and tuberculosis deaths.

Bioethics.net’s Summer Johnson draws our attention to a particularly undesirable effect of high gas prices: cuts in home health services.

Curtis Brainard at CJR provides a very thorough analysis of the renewed interest in GM crops and their potential to solve the food crisis.

Kaid Benfield at NRDC’s Switchboard chides the environmental movement for failing to be more vocal about obesity and its environmental causes, and later in the week posts about how Google Maps can now help.

Welcome to the world of citizen scientists. Never before in recent history have so many average citizens, untrained in the sciences, turned themselves into amateur researchers. They are not waiting for an invitation or hoping the next generation will improve on the country’s dismal science literacy rates. Instead, they are jumping in now to change the way science gets done. And they may hold the key to the development of a sound national science policy.

“Citizen science” has helped democratize science and helped people to understand they can have an influence on science by being a part of it,” argues Rick Bonney, an education expert at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, NY, in the Cyber Diver News Network column, “Volunteer Citizen Scientists Dive in for Sex on the Beach,” (the column, by the way, is about cataloguing fish mating habits on the beach).

Scientists and Congress should trust the public’s capacity to learn, draw conclusions, and contribute.

“Lately, all manner of ways to ‘involve’ the public in science policy and practice have cropped up,” add Rick Borchelt and Kathy Hudson in a recent Science Progress column, “Engaging the Scientific Community with the Public.” “Scientific associations are developing centers devoted to public engagement in science, funding agencies have created sweeping mandates for collecting public input on research, and research-performing institutions are hosting community meetings and science cafes about their work.”

In fact, Congress mandates that federal agencies such as the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, among others, fulfill public input and outreach activities. Individually, members of Congress also solicit public input through their websites. And, researchers, looking for ways to stretch limited budgets and secure public support for their work, are starting to pay attention to the lay public, too.

Problem is, Congress is no longer talking to scientists or the public (including our citizen scientists) like they used to. When the congressional Office of Technology Assessment was shut down in 1995, Congress lost its independent experts, which in turn led to less and less thoughtful science policymaking by members of Congress, and more and more partisan squabbling over “sound science.” Citizens interested in science who once relied on their representatives to turn to the OTA for advice were suddenly left out in the cold; today’s budding legions of citizen scientists have no single congressional office to help or make their voices heard.

Without the OTA, special interest groups, researchers, and politicians all rushed in—all of them claiming to speak on the public’s behalf. A crisis of public trust escalated. As Bochelt and Hudson note, “an erosion of public trust that began as a trickle of doubt about radiation safety and pesticides has grown to program-threatening uprisings against emerging new technologies, from genetically altered “Frankenfoods” to concern over “grey goo” in nanotechnology.”

It is time to have a new OTA, but one with citizen participation. Scientists and Congress should trust the public’s capacity to learn, draw conclusions, and contribute. Invite the public to do more, and put a process in place so citizens and researchers can work together to impart sound policy advice to Congress. In short, they should help bridge the divide.

The obvious way to do this is for Congress to appropriate funds to reopen a new Office of Technology Assessment, and include legislative language requiring it to solicit input from a diversity of stakeholders. This is not a new idea. Just prior to the shuttering of OTA, political scientist Norman Vig called for the OTA to hold “public consensus conferences” to broaden the range of people who could influence science policy decisions.[1]

Indeed, other nations have been quicker to recognize the need to listen to the voice of the people. In 1995, for example, the Danish Parliament established a Board of Technology that has consistently employed a number of participatory methods, including jury deliberations, workshops and consensus conferences. Right now, the Danish agency is initiating a “World Wide Views on Global Warming” study. Citizens from all over the world will work with scientific experts, political decision makers and other stakeholders to address key environmental issues in preparation for the 2009 United Nations climate summit in Copenhagen.

A set of converging factors call for creating a new, inclusive, forward-thinking Office of Technology Assessment.

In the United States, the idea of bringing back the OTA has never been dormant. In the 13 years since the OTA closed, Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ) and Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) have championed several attempts to reopen its doors. Other efforts are mounting. Yet, as noted science journalist Chris Mooney wrote in a Science Progress column titled “Science, Delayed” earlier this year, “the quest to restore dedicated science advice for Congress through a reborn Office of Technology Assessment has proven more difficult than one might have supposed.”

Congress is right not to reopen the old OTA. The name alone strikes a negative chord with partisan detractors who feel the Office took too long to produce reports and duplicated work by other agencies. And we shouldn’t be looking for excuses to reopen the kind of OTA designed in the 1960s, prior to globalization, in a new era of public participation and the Internet, which makes it possible to expedite research and reporting. But a set of converging factors call for creating a new, inclusive, forward-thinking Office of Technology Assessment. Now is the time for Congress to establish a mechanism to combine these forces and produce meaningful, transparent science policy—based on advice that takes into account scientific data, policy implications, and the opinions of citizens.

“Politics always swamps science,” says Michael Rodemeyer, former counsel to the House Committee on Science and Technology who is currently teaching at the University of Virginia. “The argument, I think, is more about transparency and accountability. Congress should have its own accountable experts, rather than having to rely on the backroom briefings of the think-tank-of-the-month.”

There is no shortage of topics the American public can and should weigh in on. In the last two weeks of June alone the House Science Committee addressed climate change, energy-efficient transportation, hurricane research, competitive workforces, and how an Environmental Protection Agency program “fails the public.” Additional discussions with the public should include agricultural technology, alternative fuels, arms control, banking, communications, computer security, economic development, health, natural disasters, nuclear energy, nuclear war and weapons, oceanography, oil, gas, mineral resources, transportation, math and science education, the moon, Mars, and more.

The number of issues is staggering. Congress needs all the help it can get. A revitalized 21st-century OTA can employ the talents of new organizations that have mastered the art of creating and facilitating civic engagement, including America Speaks, Public Agenda, the Loka Institute, and the Jefferson Center.

“After engaging thousands of citizens on complex issues such as the D.C. budget, recovery planning in New Orleans, and California health care policy,” says Evan Paul of America Speaks, “we have seen that when decision makers are committed to authentic engagement, citizens can help them identify appropriate, nuanced, and publicly-supported policy solutions.”

In short, citizen participation works. It can break the special-interest deadlock, connect government to voters and shed light on important public issues. So why aren’t we mobilizing one of America’s greatest resources?

Darlene Cavalier (Darlene@sciencecheerleader.com) is a former Philadelphia 76ers cheerleader who studied the role of citizens in science policy as a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania. Professionally she creates public science programs for Discover Magazine, Disney, Space.com and the National Science Foundation and is the voice of the ScienceCheerleader.com.

Notes

[1] Sclove, Richard. “The Chronicle of Higher Education,” Vol. 40, No. 19 (12 January 1994), pp. B1-B2.