By M. Anthony Mills
December 06, 2019
RCP
Political momentum is building to revive the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), a congressional agency that once provided lawmakers with nonpartisan technical expertise. Presidential candidates Elizabeth Warren and Andrew Yang have even made reviving the OTA planks of their platforms, with Yang making a plug for the OTA during the fifth Democratic debate.
Although there have been efforts to reopen or re-imagine the OTA since its closure in 1995, Capitol Hill has been abuzz this past year with proposals to get Congress up to speed on science and technology (S&T). In the fall of 2018, Congress directed the Congressional Research Service (CRS) to contract with the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) to study the issue, intimating that Congress may actually mean business. The NAPA report, released shortly before the Thanksgiving holiday, offered recommendations for whether and how to strengthen Congress' “technology assessment” capacity and to improve S&T expertise in Congress generally.
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