More Bureaucrats Needed?

SCIENCE AND ENVIRONMENT

More Bureaucrats Needed?

Adam Keiper, "Science and Congress," The New Atlantis, Winter 2005 (thenewatlantis.com)

Adam Keiper, managing editor of the new conservative magazine of science and culture, The New Atlantis, looks at the history of the Congressional

Office of Technology Assessment from its creation in 1972 to its abolition in 1995 and asks whether a similar institute needs to be re-established. The office existed to "provide the legislative branch with adequate and timely information, independently developed, relating to the potential impact of technological applications."

The Office of Technology Assessment had a difficult existence, primarily because it was dominated by Congressional liberals. In the end, despite a period in which the Office produced many useful and in-depth studies, the widespread perception of liberal bias caused its demise. Keiper traces the beginning of demands for its abolition to the highly critical 1984 report on the Reagan administration's Strategic Defense Initiative. In 1995, Congress cut funding for the Office of Technology Assessment to zero, effectively killing it. According to Keiper, this created an "advice deficit" in Congress, with Congressmen largely getting their scientific advice from friendly or private sources.

While Keiper faithfully presents the original conservative case against the Office, he also presents a conservative case for reinstating it. A new Office of Technology Assessment would cost little and have the potential to save billions of dollars from going to wasteful projects. Keiper also argues that Congress does in fact need its own, independent source of scientific advice. "The scientific and technological enterprise is astonishingly ungoverned and unaccountable in America, and it sometimes functions with total disregard of the public interest," writes Keiper. "Restoring OTA might be a small first step toward a remedy, so long as it remains a center for independent analysis of scientific issues, not an effort to reduce all policy questions to questions that scientific expertise alone can settle."