Office of Technology Assessment, United States Congress, science, technology, policy
Emily Yehle | Roll Call | May 6, 2009
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.”
Rush Holt | Wired Science | April 29, 2009
In an op-ed article, Rep. Holt makes the case that it is time for Congress to restore an important science resource to its rightful place – referring, of course, to OTA. Holt points out that since very few members of Congress are scientists, they need their own source of science advice. He said:
While members of Congress do not suffer from a lack of information, we lack time and resources to assess the validity, credibility, and usefulness of the large amount of scientific information and advice we receive as it affects actual policy decisions. The purpose of the OTA was to assist members of Congress in this task. It both provided an important long-term perspective and alerted Congress to scientific and technological components of policy that might not be obvious.
Holt mentioned that OTA wrote comprehensive reports in the 1990s on issues that the Congress and the President are preparing to address today, for example: clinical preventive services, patient cost-sharing, health care in rural America, and health technologies. OTA also reported to Congress on energy efficiency, including how to save energy on transportation.
Chris Mooney | Discover Blogs/The Intersection | March 31, 2009
A blog entry points to several articles that are calling for OTA to be restarted, and says that OTA should be brought back because “…Congress is literally flying blind. There is no body of consensus information that our legislators can use for the purposes of decision-making; but there is a heck of a lot of nonsense being fed to them constantly.”
ScienceCheerleader | March29, 2009
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?”
Gerald L. Epstein | Science Progress | March 31, 2009
An article gives a brief history of OTA and argues that the Congress needs technical support much more today than when OTA was orginally created. The article also points out that OTA is not just for scientists:
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.
Eric Meade | The Extreme Future | February 2009
A blog entry says that the new administration marks a change in our society’s views of the future and a chance to renew support of programs that that engage in active foresight. A few such programs from the 70’s were mentioned: the Office of Technology Assessment and The Congressional Clearinghouse for the Future. According to the blog,
In 1974, the House Select Committee on Committees stipulated that each standing committee “shall review and study on a continuing basis undertake futures research and forecasting on matters within its jurisdiction,” a rarely observed requirement that remains on the books to this day.
The entry says, “Regardless of what specific values emerge during the next four years or beyond, it is clear that the U.S. is ready for a new approach to the future that envisions and creates the type of world we would like to give to our children.”
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