Groups Call for Congress to Restore Funding to Technology Experts

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Dear Chairman Cole, Ranking Member Wasserman Schultz, and members of the Legislative Branch Appropriations Subcommittee:

We are writing to urge you to restore funding to the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA). The important issues facing Congress frequently require technological and scientific assessments, and lawmakers need expertise to understand the capabilities, costs, and benefits and risks of these new tools. OTA provided this information in a unique way, combining deep expertise, the ability to talk to stakeholders, and a unique bipartisan board that ensured the findings of OTA's reports were relevant, substantive, and unbiased. In light of recent debates over national security and telecommunications policy, Congress needs its own source of technological expertise.

OTA was created in 1972 to equip Congress with “new and effective means for securing competent, unbiased information concerning the physical, biological, economic, social, and political effects” of technology. In the words of a Congressional Research Service Report, OTA “was intended to facilitate congressional access to expertise and permit legislators to consider objectively information presented by the executive branch, interest groups, and other stakeholders to controversial policy questions.¹

At its height, OTA generated hundreds of reports at a relatively modest cost of $20 million annually.² It was defunded in 1995 along with other entities like the Administrative Conference of the United States, which itself was restored in 2010.³

Public interest advocates have called repeatedly for OTA to resume operations.⁴ Indeed, the model is so respected that the President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies recommended recreating the OTA "within the Civil Liberties and Privacy Protection Board to assess Intelligence Community technology initiatives and support privacy-enhancing technologies.”⁵

Technology plays a central role in our lives, from biomedicine to banking, from national security to new energy sources. Congress needs an independent source of expertise it can trust. Please restore funding for OTA.

We welcome the opportunity to discuss this with you further. Please contact Daniel Schuman, policy director, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, at 202-408-5565 or Amy Bennett, assistant director, OpenTheGovernment.org, at 202-332-6736.