The Federation of American Scientists is offering a new online collection of resources pertaining to the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), the congressional advisory organization that produced an enduring body of science policy literature before it was terminated by Congress in 1995.
“The OTA was an invaluable resource that informed Congress about an incredibly broad range of science and technology issues,” said Henry Kelly, President of the Federation of American Scientists and a former OTA staff member. “Numerous reports, on subjects such as transportation, energy, health care, and information technology remain relevant more than 10 years after OTA issued its final report.”
The new archive includes all of the official OTA publications, which have also been published online by Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School, as well as various previously unreleased documents and memoranda, interviews, and related materials.
Our environmental system was built for 1970s-era pollution control, but today it needs stable, integrated, multi-level governance that can make tradeoffs, share and use evidence, and deliver infrastructure while demonstrating that improved trust and participation are essential to future progress.
Durable and legitimate climate action requires a government capable of clearly weighting, explaining, and managing cost tradeoffs to the widest away of audiences, which in turn requires strong technocratic competency.
FAS is launching the Center for Regulatory Ingenuity (CRI) to build a new, transpartisan vision of government that works – that has the capacity to achieve ambitious goals while adeptly responding to people’s basic needs.
This runs counter to public opinion: 4 in 5 of all Americans, across party lines, want to see the government take stronger climate action.