OTA Archive

Jathan Sadowski| the Atlantic |October 26, 2012

According to Sadowski’s technology post, The Much-Needed and Sane Congressional Office That Gingrich Killed Off and We Need Back,  OTA was started because “Congress recognized that it could not afford to wander blindly forward without an organization that would bridge technical expertise and political decision-making.”  To prevent “capture by a particular political party,”  OTA was overseen by a balanced bipartisan congressional Board with six Members from both the House and the Senate.

Sadowski pointed out that  OTA released over 750 studies on an “impressive range of topics,”  including the environment, national security, health, and social issues.

The dismantling of the agency in 1995 “on the Gingrich Republican’s altar of slashed budgets” was “an unfortunate blow,” according to Sadowski.  However,  “there has been vocal support by many prominent scholars and politicians to either re-fund it or establish a similar method of technology assessment.”

Nicholas Thompson|  New Yorker Culture Desk | January 6, 2012

In his  blog, “Republicans vs. Science: Ranking the Candidates,” Thompson evaluates the science and technology  policies of the Republican candidates.    Newt Gingrich had the highest ranking – even though, as Speaker, he abolished the Office of Technology Assessment, “a move reminiscent of Nixon abolishing the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy,” according to Thompson.

Bruce Bartlett also points out Gingrich’s inconsistencies in his N.Y. Times  Economix blog, “Gingrich and the Destruction of Congressional Expertise.” He said that professional Congressional staff members – especially those with technical expertise – had been an obstacle to Mr. Gingrich’s “grandiose schemes.”  “To remove this obstacle, Mr. Gingrich did everything in his power to dismantle Congressional institutions that employed people with the knowledge, training and experience to know a harebrained idea when they saw it,” according to Bartlett.

“In addition to decimating committee budgets,” Bartlett added, “he also abolished two really useful Congressional agencies, the Office of Technology Assessment and the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations. The former brought high-level scientific expertise to bear on legislative issues and the latter gave state and local governments an important voice in Congressional deliberations.”

Lorelei Kelly, in her Huffington Post article, “Dumb By Design: Gingrich’s Lobotomy of Congress and Today’s Dysfunction,”  mentions Gingrich’s  Contract for America,  which “wiped out the shared system of expert knowledge and analysis inside Congress. The bill made Congress dumb — on purpose. ”

The resulting brainpower losses included the Office of Technology Assessment,  the bipartisan Democratic Study Group, the Arms Control and Foreign Policy Caucus, and shared committee staffs.

Similar sentiments were echoed in:

Government Executive’s  Fed Blog, “ Defunct Agency Still Missed,” by Charles S. Clark;

the  Washington Post’s  Federal Eye, “When Congress wiped an agency off the map,” by Ed O’Keefe;

“Closing a federal agency and making Congress dumber — thank Newt Gingrich” posted in Under the Mountain Bunker; and

Econbrowser, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the beancounters,” by Menzie Chinn.