OTA RIP: sad reunion

A month ago, the American Association for the Advancement of Science hosted a bittersweet event in its New York Avenue Headquarters in downtown DC, a reunion of former staff and “friends” of the congressional Office of Technology Assessment (OTA). OTA was a victim of the 1994 congressional revolution. The newly elected Congress eliminated the congressional agency with the weakest constituency. The favored joke among OTA staff was that Congress started by cutting off its head. No kidding.

We got together to commemorate OTA’s demise after a decade. Looking back, it feels like OTA’s death was a harbinger, a foretaste of continual partisan combat over S&T policy, a political domain once relatively nonpartisan (with some conspicuous exceptions, such as Star Wars). The new Republican majority distrusted OTA, suspecting it was a nest of covert liberal Democrats disguised as analysts. So kill the enemy.

The Republicans were correct that most OTA staff were more liberal than the new Members of Congress. But OTA was also scrupulously bipartisan. And that’s why its absence is most significant. Institutions seeking common ground find themselves in a killing zone.

The very first lesson I learned at OTA was to listen to all stakeholders, across the ideological spectrum, and to be rigorously disciplined about meeting with and paying attention to both parties. The process was systematically bipartisan. Bipartisan is not the same as nonpartisan or objective, but it’s a damn sight better than what we’ve got now.

Without an OTA equivalent, S&T advice is channeled through external constituencies and the executive branch, which is inherently administration-dependent. Congress has lost most of its S&T analytical capacity, and the executive branch has lost its credibility. Have we given up on bipartisanship, resigned to polarized S&T war rhetoric, without even the option of consensual, incremental building?

Mr. Gingrich and Senator Clinton, tear down that wall! Then build sturdy structures that restore a bipartisan ethos. A good place to start is science and technology policy, where partisanship is particularly stupid and destructive.