Congress's Own Think Tank

Learning from the Legacy of the Office of Technology Assessment (1972-1995)

P. Blair

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137359056
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Microeconomics
• Index: Economics

Congress' Own Think Tank recaps the OTA experience?it's creation, operation, and circumstances of its closure? and that of organizations attempting to fill the gap since OTA's closure as well as a number of new forces shaping the current context for science and technology issues facing the Congress.

1

Introduction

Abstract: The complex impacts of technology development on society present a unique challenge of how to help the U.S. Congress understand and cope with the implications of technology change in ways that are closely aligned with congressional needs and directly responsive and accountable to Congress. In 1972 the United States Congress established the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) as a small analytical agency to become better informed about implications of new and emerging technologies. OTA ceased operations in 1995, but many researchers and congressional observers assert today that creating a new mechanism or adapting an existing one originally designed for different purposes is needed to fill the void left by OTA’s closure. The OTA history is an important case study in considering future such efforts.

Blair, Peter, D. Congress’s Own Think Tank: Learning from the Legacy of the Office of Technology Assessment (1972–1995). New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. DOI: 10.1057/9781137359056.

The United States Congress created the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) in 1972 as a small analytical agency to assist the Congress “in the identification and consideration of existing and probable impacts of technological application” in order to ensure that “the consequences of technological applications be anticipated, understood, and considered in determination of public policy on existing and emerging national problems.”¹ OTA ceased operations in 1995 and officially shut its doors the next year, but its 23 year history is a compelling case study worth revisiting for important lessons learned in considering increasingly needed future mechanisms for providing science and technology policy analysis tuned specifically to the needs of Congress.

OTA’s creation was the result of a mixture of foresight, clearly defined need, and the politics of the time. This monograph chronicles OTA’s origins in the 1960s and 1970s, recaps its role in the Congress, both as conceived at the time of the agency’s creation and as its operations and organization evolved. The book also highlights some of the agency’s key accomplishments during that period, recaps the circumstances of its closure in 1995, and outlines how the environment for science and technology advice to the Congress has evolved since then. Finally, the volume concludes with a list of key features that would be important as part of any new mechanism designed to fill the void left by OTA’s closure, some of which have emerged in other organizations over the last 18 years but others of which have not so far.

The context for science and technology advice for Congress

As World War II was coming to a close in 1945, the United States found itself in the midst of sweeping changes of its economy as well as in its relationship with the rest of the world. The massive industrialization assembled to fuel the war efforts in Europe and Asia became the basis for a new economy—transformed from agricultural roots to a complex maze of factories, cars, and consumption. Unlike Europe and Asia, which were both facing a decade or more of postwar reconstruction, the United States had different challenges, centered in part on enabling the nation to adjust to millions of servicemen returning from overseas.

America’s postwar economic transformation was spurred by a combination of pent up consumer demand during the war years combined with the “baby boom” of the 1950’s, structural economic change, and government policy. The structural change included dramatic increases in agricultural productivity from technological innovation, and a continuation of innovation and technology development that had been so instrumental to the war effort. The culture of innovation both fueled expansion of the rapidly growing civilian economy and supplied the military-industrial complex, as President Dwight D. Eisenhower described the continuing role of military spending as the Cold War with the Soviet Union unfolded.

The role of government policy in America’s postwar economic transformation was important as well. In 1944 as President Franklin D. Roosevelt began to plan for the nation’s transition from wartime to a peacetime economy, he sought to craft a postwar veterans assistance program to help returning servicemen, their families, and the nation as a whole cope with the wrenching changes to the economy considered likely as millions of servicemen returned from overseas searching for employment.

Both the president and the United States Congress sought to prevent a repetition of the lapse into the Great Depression that followed World War I and the “Bonus March” of veterans in 1932, which came about in response to Congress’s 1924 program to issue bonus certificates worth 1,000 dollars each to World War I veterans. The certificates were not redeemable until 1945 and, as the Great Depression deepened in the early 1930s, many veterans were unwilling to wait. They marched on Washington, DC in May of 1932 to demand that Congress pay the bonus earlier. Remembering that disruptive experience, Congress passed the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, commonly referred to as the G.I. Bill of Rights, which became law on June 22, 1944.

Among the key provisions of the G.I. Bill was a program of low interest, zero down-payment home loans for returning servicemen, which enabled millions of American families to move out of urban apartments and into suburban homes, leading quickly to an extended boom in housing construction. Innovation, such as air conditioning, also helped eventually spur larger scale geographic migration as well, such as to the “Sun Belt” leading to rapid population growth in Houston, Atlanta, Miami, and Phoenix and generally in the U.S. south and southwest with many industries following, including new industries such as aviation and electronics.

Just as significant as the housing benefit in the G.I. Bill was the unprecedented education benefit—cash payments of tuition and living expenses to attend college, high school or pursue vocational education. By the end of the program in 1956, over two million veterans had used the G.I. Bill education benefits in order to attend colleges or universities, and an additional nearly seven million used these benefits for some kind of training program. The end result of these various forces was that by 1960 the middle class in America had swollen, as had gross domestic product (GDP) and economic productivity. The United States entered a “golden age” of economic growth, which was distributed fairly evenly across the economic classes and came from the movement of low-income farm workers into better paying jobs in towns and cities. The economy had also transformed to one employing a better educated workforce and in which massive industrial plants had been converted successfully from producing tanks and military planes to also producing and assembling cars, trucks, commercial aircraft, and countless other industrial products. But economic growth and a competition with the Soviets in the accelerating Cold War both relied heavily on the newly prominent resource of technological innovation. The rapid post–World War II pace of science and technology development continues today essentially unabated, if not accelerating, as illustrated by remarkable advances in biology, medicine, defense, energy, information and telecommunications, and many other areas. These developments present enduring benefits to society as well as sobering challenges.

The circumstances of the promise and challenges associated with new technology development are, of course, worldwide, but in modern history they seem particularly connected to the American experience as just outlined. In 1997 German journalist Josef Joffe characterized the uniqueness of the American innovation engine as: “Something funny happened on the way down from the Cold War.” In his article for the New York Times² he recaps the bipolar world of the time—as the Cold War was coming to a close—and the perceptions on the part of many that the United States was pushing an agenda of “big-brother imperialism.” Joffe confronts a number of “declinist” authors of the time who argued that the post–Cold War United States was developing in a manner similar to Hapsburg Spain of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries or even the fall of Rome—arrogant, overreaching, and oblivious to the fact that military ambitions were outpacing economic resources.

In response, Joffe first recounted that Philip II of Spain and Louis XIV of France devoted 75 percent of their nations’ government spending to the military, while Washington devoted less than 30 percent—still an extraordinary amount, especially relative to other nations, but nothing like the Hapsburgs.³ Joffe’s key insight, however, about the unique American experience was that Hapsburg Spain was strong as long as it was rich. The Hapsburg empire’s primary source of wealth was the gold and silver taken from Latin America. Joffe concludes that as that source of wealth declined, the Hapsburg’s “muscle shriveled,” and in sharp contrast America’s wealth in the post–Cold War world is very different—stemming principally not from resource extraction but from production of goods and services (perhaps increasingly the latter over the last two decades) and, above all, from “relentless adaptation and innovation.”

Joffe characterizes the U.S. approach as: “If steel falters, let’s do microchips; if the Japanese grab the camera market, Hollywood will flood the world with movies. Unlike the Hapsburgs, America’s riches aren’t dug from the ground, they roll out of labs, research outfits and universities. And that is an inexhaustible resource.”⁴ While Joffe certainly understates the abundance of natural resources in the United States, his principal conclusion is that the nation’s most bountiful sustainable “resource” is its massive innovation engine and, to remain strong, the United States cannot risk losing the powerful advantage that engine provides. This view, advanced by many in recent years, is embodied at least aspirationally in the “America Creating Opportunities to Meaningfully Promote Excellence in Technology, Education, and Science Act of 2007” (P.L. 110–69), commonly referred to as the America COMPETES Act, which was signed into law by President Bush in 2007 “to invest in innovation through research and development, and to improve the competitiveness of the United States.”⁵

The America COMPETES Act typifies recognition of the economic and social benefits of technology innovation and development, and defines pathways for realizing those benefits. However, the role of government in helping reap the benefits and cope with the challenges of technology change is becoming more complex and significant, whether it is in incorporating technology into national security strategies; in regulating technology impacts in commerce or on environment, health and safety; in promoting innovation and research; in improving performance; in reducing cost of infrastructure; or in addressing the many other areas where technology, society, and government interact.⁶ Accompanying these trends is a continuing expansion of the overall scale and scope of the nation’s science and technology enterprise as well, which includes rapid expansion of the roles of both the private sector and government.

There is a current policy debate about the degree of urgency about current and future health of American science and technology. Many argue that without urgent attention to various features of the role of science and technology in economic growth, the current very strong position the United States holds in terms of international competition will erode quickly. For example, the 2007 National Academies of Sciences and Engineering report, Rising Above the Gathering Storm, identifies the features that require urgent attention as: increasing the number and quality of trained scientists, sustaining and strengthening the nation’s commitment to basic research, promoting a research environment that encourages development, recruitment, and retention of the best and brightest students, scientists, and engineers, and adopting policies that firmly connect the nation’s capacity for innovation to economic growth and international competitiveness.⁷ Others echo this urgency, such as the Council on Competitiveness (2102) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2013), but some, while agreeing with the troubling trends, see somewhat less urgency. For example, Galama and Hosek (2008) conclude: “While the United States is still performing at or near the top in many measures of S&T leadership, this leadership must not be taken for granted.”⁸ More recently, regarding the pipeline of scientists in America in particular, Xie and Killewald (2012) conclude: “Although our evidence does not support the claims of either a glut of young scientists or an impending shortage, we found causes for concern in some areas of American science.”⁹ These authors recognize and acknowledge the long-term concerns, if perhaps not the degree of urgency, expressed in the National Academies report and endorsed by others for recommending action, but go on to characterize the complex relationships among the forces of economic globalizatio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction
• 2  Pre-History: Meeting the Need for Science Advice to the U.S. Congress
• 3  Key Features of the Technology Assessment Act of 1972
• 4  Startup: Setting the Agenda in OTAs Early Years
• 5  Growing Pains: Evolution of OTAs Process of Technology Assessment
• 6  Impact and Influence as the OTA Model Matured
• 7  Closing OTA: Transition in the 104th Congress
• 8  After the Fall: Post OTA Efforts to Fill the Gap
• 9  Looking Forward: Comparing Future Options
• 10  Conclusions
• Appendix: The Technology Assessment Act of 1972
• Bibliography
• Index