Last week, before the midterms rocked Washington, four Democrats and one Republican introduced the “Congressional Office of Technology Improvement and Enhancement Act,” to little fanfare. If passed, the bill would create an in-house research hub to provide lawmakers with expert advice and analysis on new technology and its effects. While it may not be the flashiest of opening moves for Democrats, it could wind up being the most strategically advantageous item atop the new majority’s agenda next year.
For starters, establishing the Congressional Office of Technology would send a needed message: After two years of the Trump administration’s attacks on science, there’s work to be done, not just to restore what’s been lost, but to better understand how to legislate in an era of Silicon Valley dominance. The new office would also provide the sort of policy expertise that lawmakers have been missing out on for years. “Congress cannot continue flying blind into the future,” Rep. Mark Takano, D- Calif., said in a statement. “We must have an office of independent experts as we face important decisions to guide emerging technology.”
After two years of the Trump administration’s attacks on science, there’s work to be done, not just to restore what’s been lost, but to better understand how to legislate in an era of Silicon Valley dominance.
“Flying blind” is something of an understatement given the complexities that Congress is expected to be able to tackle. Cryptocurrency and blockchains, artificial intelligence chatbots and cyberwar scenarios, even the now ubiquitous spread of social media — all are challenges that legislators have been woefully underequipped to handle. (It’s been 20 years since the late Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, infamously described the internet as a “series of tubes.”) Industry giants have worked to fill the information gap, with the six largest Big Tech companies employing roughly 1 lobbyist for every 1.5 members of Congress.
Most congressional offices otherwise have only their own staffers to turn to, and potentially those working for their committee assignments, neither of which have an overflow of technology policy experts on tap.
That wasn’t always the case. As Adam Keiper documented for The New Atlantis, lawmakers in 1972 found themselves unable to trust the Nixon administration, even as matters like “antiballistic missile funding, the supersonic transport project, the future of the Apollo space program, and numerous controversies related to energy and the environment” demanded their attention.
Congress established the Office of Technology Assessment in 1972, at the crossroads of the Nuclear Age and the Digital Age, to “provide the legislative branch with adequate and timely information, independently developed relating, to the potential impact” of new technologies. After its 1974 launch, the OTA dived into the research that members of Congress requested with a staff that eventually reached between 140 and 200 people, many of whom were polymathic in at least a few fields.
As Keiper noted, the broad range of issues the OTA required this kind of flexibility:
OTA wrote about gasohol and coal slurry and oil shale and nuclear power. It published on medical technologies from MRI to contact lenses to wheelchairs to prosthetics, on the oceans and outer space, and on high-tech tools for fighting crime and terrorism. There were reports on passive smoking, uses for wood, new satellite (and anti-satellite) technologies, artificial insemination, missile basing, municipal waste, and intellectual property in the information age. In a single month, the agency published reports on Russian nuclear proliferation, hip fractures in people over fifty, drug abuse, the use of virtual reality for combat training, and several other subjects.
The OTA worked to churn out some 700 publications — including a few hundred formal assessments running hundreds of pages each — during its two decades in existence. But things changed when, as part of 1994’s Republican Revolution, Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., imposed deep cuts to congressional staffing budgets. While the cuts were sold as a cost-saving measure, former GOP policy staffer Bruce Bartlett argued that Gingrich intended to “centralize power in the speaker’s office” by shutting off resources for rank-and-file members to challenge him.
Gingrich, whom Bartlett described as someone who “always considered himself to be the smartest guy in the room and long chaffed at being corrected by experts when he cooked up some new plan,” made sure to do away with the OTA and its staff, which included many people much smarter than him. Rather than passing a new law to wipe out the office, House Republicans simply zeroed out its budget, leaving it to wither on the vine.
The second-best time to bring back the OTA would be now, when the public is more eager than it has been in years for the federal government to regulate Big Tech.
There have been several efforts to revive the office in some form, recognizing the irony of Congress cutting off a source of knowledge right as the latest technological boom was gathering force. The Congressional Office of Technology would thus be an invaluable resource for Democrats — and Republicans, for that matter. While many in the party wish to continue President Donald Trump’s war on facts, an independent research group able to provide wisdom on new legislation would benefit anyone who wants to write better laws.
The best time to bring back the OTA would have been years ago. The second-best time would be now, when the public is more eager than it has been in years for the federal government to regulate Big Tech. Passing this bill when the new Congress is sworn in this January would lay the groundwork for a new era of better, smarter legislating for the benefit of all Americans.
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