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Perspectives
The Mummy Blinks
Are signs of life beginning to stir in Congress's pet mummy known as the Office of Technology Assessment? (see SPP#4) Maybe yes, maybe no. Basically the whole process of transforming the embalmed body into a muscle-flexing torso rests on whether Democrats who control the Senate are willing to work toward appropriating the money to establish at least a pilot effort to assess the impact of technologies on human lives and institutions. The Senate would then, in conference after House and Senate appropriations bills are passed, work out with the House a deal by which OTA would be reestablished.
Congress ended OTA's life in 1994 when the Republicans in control refused to appropriate any more funding for the agency whose original purpose was to provide counsel on the social implications of complex technologies. But they never outright killed OTA by terminating the authorizing law. They simply mummified OTA by denying funding in tension-filled floor and conference votes in which the House actually voted 220-204 to retain the agency. The Senate, however, led by the now-departed Connie Mack, was adamant and in conference won the day. The new Republican Congress then went about its business of selecting predominantly the kind of advice that fit an anti-government, conservative agenda.
Granger Morgan, a Carnegie Mellon University engineer active as an OTA consultant in the old days, arranged an ambitious June 14 workshop to explore various new manifestations of a scientific and technological advisory function for Congress. About 200 turned out for the meeting, a crowd largely seasoned by years of performing policy studies around various technological issues. Morgan wanted to get a discussion and dialogue going and he did. His labors partly led to the actual introduction the day before of a House bill co-sponsored by Reps. Rush Holt (D-NJ) and Amo Houghton (R-NY) to authorize $20 million of funding for the agency. The bill was referred to the House Science Committee, chaired by Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY; (see SPP#3)), which at the moment plans no hearings. Until OTA emerges as an appropriations item, however, it will have no hope of revival.
The workshop began with a morning breakfast with a handful of legislators, including Holt, Houghton, Boehlert, and his colleague on the committee, Vernon Ehlers. Some who were there from the beginning said that the members of Congress who attended were sympathetic to a new OTA, or something like it, but not very willing to try to generate enthusiasm for it among their colleagues. They repeated the complaint frequently heard about OTA's chronic deficiency reports that took too long to produce. Missing from the breakfast was a member of Congress who is key to any OTA revival: Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), ranking Republican of the Senate Appropriations Committee and a past member of OTA's board.
Morgan commissioned three thoughtful "framing papers" to provide fuller context for his workshop. The first gave a historical perspective on OTA and its relevance to Congressional decisionmaking processes. A second, by CSPO's David Guston, was on what the working life of OTA was like, how it constantly had to redefine its procedures, and what sorts of public participation mechanisms any new OTA might try. The third reviewed various European approaches to technology assessment today. Those presentations were followed by a tepid roundtable consisting of a handful of congressional staffers from influential committees. The discussion was tepid because no one but James Turner, a minority staff member of the House Science committee, could claim any living experience with an OTA functioning during its heyday. The discussion, however, focused mainly on scientific advice to Congress, not so much on a public-spirited technology assessment that was central to OTA's original conception.
Morgan also assigned individuals to explore five different models of scientific and engineering advice for Congress. The first was to establish a very small agency in Congress that would contract out studies to various thinks tanks and universities. The second was to establish technology assessment, or scientific advisory units, within three of the already existing advisory agencies for Congress--the General Accounting Office, the Congressional Budget Office, and the Congressional Research Service. Model three would be a return to the old OTA structure, except for tweaking its work to fit better with immediate congressional needs. Number four was greater use by Congress of the National Academies' consulting arm, the National Research Council, already extensively called upon by Congress to do advisory work on S&T issues. Finally, model five would make use of non-governmental organizations that would work exclusively for Congress.
After the presentations of models, the workshop broke into three working groups and the whole thing ended with summaries by five veteran laborers in the OTA vineyards, led by John H. Gibbons, the longest-term and most successful of OTA's four directors as well as popularizer of a technology-related sonnet by the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. Gibbons' frequent use of the sonnet is significant. It decries the lack of a "loom" on which should be woven into fabric the "unquestioned, uncombined" facts that shower down on a wisdom-starved humanity. Gibbons, who once more recited the sonnet, said OTA was the agency established as that very loom and that it needed to be reconstituted. See the sonnet in its entirety at the end of this dispatch.
As for the workshop on the whole, the fireworks were left in their packaging, probably because usually vocal public interest groups were not apparent as invitees. There is undoubtedly a strong, even romantic, wish that Holt and Houghton succeed in their restoration gesture. Vary Coates, who established an "Institute for Technology Assessment" that did some studies after OTA died, and who herself tried to spearhead a restoration effort, said she felt a bit dispirited by the proceedings because the congressmen at the breakfast expressed little interest in the kinds of studies OTA was meant to do: deep looks into the societal implications of new technologies.
In fact, says Coates, the entire theme was directed more toward scientific advice for Congress than toward technology assessment aimed at understanding technology's human dimensions and outcomes. "It's as if the original vision of OTA has been lost," Coates says. "They really didn't talk much about technology assessment. What they did talk about was ways to give Congress advice on scientific issues. But that's the narrow way of looking at it. Somehow or other we got sidetracked from talking about technology assessment. It's like a vision's been lost, and that's why I said that maybe we ought to start over again by giving Congress what it wants and meanwhile build up again to the basic vision." CSPO's Guston, in his background paper, did offer in a generally theoretical way, various approaches that would move assessments away from merely scientific advice. But general discussion seemed to play down Guston's theme.
Henry Kelly, who was once a program manager at OTA and is now president of the activist organization Federation of American Scientists, indicates that the lack of any participatory vision doesn't bother him all that much. He thought the meeting was important and that the proceedings were open to pretty much any kind of an approach. His concern is that the failure of OTA to survive has seriously depleted the number of people skilled in assessing science, technology, and public policy. He also believes any back or side door approach to reestablishing OTA through a Senate-House conference could be self-defeating and build at best a rickety foundation.
Sadly missing from the meeting was the spirit of George Brown, who died two years ago and served on the OTA board during the entire 22 years of its life. Brown was always pressing the scientific and engineering communities to spend more time thinking about and working on the human dimensions of what they discover and produce. Skip Stiles, who was a senior staffer for Brown for many years, noticed the basic emphasis on scientific advice but said a scientifically savvy Congress might lead eventually to a revival of Brown's spirit in Congress. "The truth of the matter is that if Congress understood science better they'd ask better questions of scientists. I don't know if the scientific community is prepared for that. Instead of one big George Brown you might have ten or fifteen little George Browns saying, 'wait a minute. Have you thought about the consequences of this?' The whole meeting was pretty value-neutral. It was all about a better process for analysis with no questions about 'to what end?' It was more about Congress being stupid by not being more scientific."
One other element that was missing from the dialogue was the impact of the Internet on the technology assessment process, which at its best involves the presence and enthusiasm of all people who have a stake in any of the technologies under question. Roger Herdman, who was at the workshop and who was OTA's last director after Gibbons left to become President Bill Clinton's science adviser, says the Internet could profoundly affect the process of assessment. "The Internet was just beginning when OTA stopped. It's astounding to think of what a new OTA could do in terms of information, productivity, and interactivity."
In any case, Morgan plans to press forward with the restoration. He isn't precise about the next steps, if any, beyond stepping up the dialogue with Congress. But a book of proceedings is being planned.
Meanwhile, that Edna St. Millay sonnet Gibbons discovered years ago, which he almost never quotes in full, seems to be gaining in visibility. A web search reveals an almost universal reference to it on policy and information matters. Though the final lines throw a bit of a wrench into scientific certainty, the sonnet, thanks to Gibbons, has certainly become the theme song for the technology assessment movement everywhere. Here it is.
Upon this age that never speaks its mind, |
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