Rep. Rush Holt testified at the House Legislative Branch Appropriations hearing Tuesday, asking the subcommittee to reinstate OTA in the 2010 budget.

“It was part of Congress. It spoke our language,” Holt was quoted as saying in the  Roll Call article. “It understood our peculiarities — how Members worked and our schedule.”

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The Science Cheerleader recently met with Rep. Holt and Congressional Fellow Will O’Neal to talk about reopening OTA. She discusses their meeting in her blog post.  The Science Cheerleader points out, “The Executive Branch (Obama) has no shortage of science and engineering advice on policy issues as well as programs to open bidirectional conversations with the public on key policy issues. Why shouldn’t Congress have the same resources available to them?”

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A blog post about the failure of the Congress to reinstate OTA says, “While the OTA may have died on the altar of partisan ideology in 1995, its revival today seems to be inhibited by a bipartisan failure to understand why it’s needed.”

Read more about Rep. Rush Holt’s (D-NJ) recent efforts to reinstate OTA here.

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“This month, the Alzheimer’s Association issued a new report, 2008 Alzheimer’s Disease Facts and Figures, which contains powerful data about the disease. As reported, 5.2 million Americans live with Alzheimer’s and an estimated 10 million baby boomers – one out of eight – will develop the disease. It is the seventh leading cause of death in the U.S.

Alzheimer’s is a tragic and devastating disease that touches us all in some way. Congress and the President should ensure that the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health have the funding they need to advance research into the disease.

More than 20 years ago, the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) – a support agency created to provide Congress with objective and authoritative analysis of complex scientific and technical issues to aid in policymaking – issued “Losing a Million Minds: Confronting the Tragedy of Alzheimer’s Disease and Other Dementias.” This comprehensive and valuable report remains an important resource about the disease and what we need to do to combat it. It is also a good example of why Congress needs to restore funding for the OTA, which was defunded in 1994.”

Sincerely,

RUSH HOLT
Member of Congress

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Mr. Grotto reports here that the complete set of material contained on the OTA legacy CDs, as compiled by Bill Craeger et al., are now available in the government archives collection at North Texas University.

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