In the autumn of 2001, a new national security threat arrived by mail. Envelopes carrying a fine, nearly invisible powder had begun traveling through the postal system. One letter reached a tabloid’s newsroom in Boca Raton, Florida, killing a photo editor within a few weeks. Other letters arrived at NBC News and the New York Post. In mid-October, a letter addressed to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle was opened in the Hart Senate Office Building, releasing anthrax spores and shutting down the building for months. By the time the letters stopped, five people were dead and 17 more infected.
Still reeling from September 11, lawmakers scrambled. How easily could a biological weapon be acquired or made? What might happen if the attack were larger and more sophisticated?
At a congressional hearing that November, lawmakers cited findings from a 1993 report titled “Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction: Assessing the Risks.” Written in plain language, the report described various weapons’ effects, the technical aspects of monitoring and controlling production, and the trade-offs among nonproliferation tools. It happened to specifically warn that under the right weather conditions, 100 kilograms of anthrax released in the nation’s capital could kill up to three million people—a casualty outcome that, “pound for pound of weapon,” could exceed a nuclear bomb’s. According to one journalist, “in the rush to sort out fact from fiction, rumor from real scientific fact, Congress was using reliable information from a group that was charged with studying the real ramifications of bioterrorism.”
That group, the Office of Technology Assessment, or OTA, had in fact been defunct for years. Created in 1972, OTA had been a small but proud agency that worked for Congress alone, helping lawmakers navigate science and technology issues with nonpartisan expertise. When advances in genetics raised the prospect that a blood test might reveal a disease-causing mutation, it was OTA that examined what that knowledge might mean for privacy, insurance, and discrimination. Over the years, the agency took on acid rain, mammograms, telecommunications, drug abuse, missile defense, intellectual property, pest control, electronic surveillance, agricultural technologies, and the disposal of nuclear waste, among hundreds of other issues. Wherever Congress might be caught flat-footed as the world changed, OTA could be found nearby.
Congress appreciated the help. A 1990 survey of congressional staff reported that zero percent of respondents found OTA “not useful.” (Half of them said “very.”) A 1993 study by the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution concluded that “the agency is considered highly credible by members of both parties.” Nonetheless, in a mad rush to slash federal spending in the mid-’90s, Congress defunded it. “We are cutting off one of the most important arms of Congress when we cut off unbiased knowledge about science and technology,” lamented Republican Representative Amo Houghton. A few years later, as a biological weapon made its way through the mail, Congress reached for the work of a team it had let fall by the wayside.
Right about now would be a good time to bring OTA back. In recent months, a parade of senior researchers and executives from the country’s top technology companies has issued alarms about artificial intelligence, using terms like “human extinction.” Jacob Coxon, a former researcher at Anthropic, wrote that companies like OpenAI and his own former employer are “gambling with our lives.” The prospect of advanced artificial intelligence escaping human control is not a new worry, but the very public warnings by industry insiders have very suddenly shaken Washington.
Company leaders have their preferred approaches. OpenAI wants mandatory national safety requirements and industry-led standards. Anthropic has called for independent safety evaluators inside companies and a slowdown in development. Nvidia argues that slowing down is unnecessary and that speed and safety are a “false choice.” The executive branch, meanwhile, has its own technical experts, while lobbyists, trade associations, academics, labor groups, and AI safety organizations press their own theories of problems and solutions. Congress is hearing from no shortage of people with something to say about the way forward.
The issue facing Congress, at least initially, is not one of selecting a particular approach among a clear set of options. It is to determine which claims being made are true, what remains unknown, and what each proposed intervention would likely accomplish. The principal and overwhelming challenge is to wade through an extraordinary amount of information—much of it technical, some of it contradictory, and most of it laden with uncertainty. It is precisely the sort of problem OTA was designed to solve.
This September, Axios reported that more than two dozen members of Congress and governors said they either don’t use artificial intelligence or have used it only rarely. Axios called it a “striking admission.” A House Democrat, meanwhile, called it “fucking absurd”—that people overseeing the technology might not be regular users.
This view of things suggests that if only lawmakers knew more, from personal experience or otherwise, they would legislate better. But we similarly expect Congress to legislate on issues like war without serving in the military and on agriculture without ever having tilled the land. Why, in this case, should we expect them to be users of a particular technology in order to regulate it? Of course, we don’t actually expect lawmakers to be personal experts in most things. No one seems to have an issue with lawmakers overseeing the work of NASA absent experience with space travel. But we do expect them to rely on the expertise of others—to gather it, to assess it, and to make informed decisions with it. The problem facing Congress is not really a question of knowledge but a question of capacity.
Congress is drowning in advice. Lawmakers are inundated from think tanks, trade associations, lobbyists, advocates, and armies of experts from the executive branch, all telling Congress how to do its job. Talk with anyone on Capitol Hill today, and what you will not hear is a complaint about too few meetings with too few people offering their ideas. What Congress lacks is the ability to make sense of it all: to sort through the torrents of information flooding the institution and pull out what’s important—and also true—so that lawmakers can make informed choices. A lack of capacity is the underlying deficiency.
This is made all the more difficult because most of the information coming into Congress has a source with something at stake. Advice givers are rarely providing lawmakers with unvarnished analysis. As a member once griped to me during a 2019 interview on Congress’s capacity constraints: “We all have our biases here, but we also sometimes just want information we actually think is free of political leanings. This is harder to find than you think.” Which is to say, Congress lacks the ability not only to make sense of all the information but also to feel confident about its impartiality. Enter OTA.
To understand how OTA worked, consider a debate over commercial explosives. In 1980, Congress was contemplating a bill that would have required manufacturers to add chemical markers to explosives, known as taggants, that supposedly made it easier for law enforcement to trace the materials after a bombing. When a bomb detonated, investigators could theoretically recover the markers from the debris and trace the explosive back through the supply chain. Explosives manufacturers strongly opposed the idea, telling lawmakers that the solution was both costly and ineffective. Also chiming in were federal, state, and local law enforcement; aviation and airport-safety officials; and scientists and weapons engineers. Each had pieces of important information—some of it contradictory—and also preferred outcomes. The questions involved, moreover, were technical: For example, would the markers actually survive an explosion? Would they yield useful information? And at what cost?
Lawmakers turned to OTA, whose job it was to gather the evidence and make it legible. What questions could be resolved? What was still unproven? OTA wasn’t performing original research as much as it was analyzing the scope of what was known, in light of scientific uncertainty and disagreements. In this case, it found that taggants could in fact be useful to law enforcement. But its analysis also raised genuine technical concerns regarding their safety and the costs of a tracing regime. It did not collapse those findings into a thumbs-up or thumbs-down answer, but rather laid out the various policy paths Congress could take, with the trade-offs of each. Congress ultimately came out where the manufacturers wanted it to, declining to impose the taggant mandate. But OTA had given lawmakers a basis for getting there that did not depend on taking the manufacturers’ word for it. OTA equipped lawmakers with the capacity to make an informed judgment.
Having an independent source of in-house expertise also helped strengthen Congress’s hand in its dealings with the executive branch. In 1983, the Reagan administration moved to expand the government’s use of polygraphs to investigate leaks of classified information. Congress asked OTA to examine whether the machine could actually do what its proponents promised. OTA concluded that the technology could register physiological signs of stress but could not reliably tell whether that stress arose from deception or some other form of anxiety. Congress imposed a temporary moratorium on the proposed expansion while it considered the evidence. A few years later, as it weighed restrictions on private employers’ use of polygraphs, it again drew on OTA’s findings. The resulting Employee Polygraph Protection Act generally prohibited private employers from using lie-detector tests.
In neither the explosives nor the polygraphs case did OTA tell lawmakers what to do. It did not tell Congress that taggants should or should not be required; instead, it laid out for lawmakers what each choice would likely buy, cost, and risk. Nor had it told Congress that the executive branch couldn’t pursue leaks or that employers had no legitimate interest in theft and fraud. But it had separated the promise attached to a technology from the evidence for what it could accomplish. OTA acted as an “impartial ‘honest broker,’” said Representative Houghton. “Members of Congress are deluged with advice from many quarters, but it is often tinged with the underlying bias and political agenda of the bearer.”
Perhaps almost to a fault, the agency was fanatical in its commitment to analysis, not prescription. OTA’s leadership and staff knew that in a highly partisan environment, any move in the wrong direction—any whiff of seeming like it was taking sides, on policy or politics—would imperil its reputation, and ultimately its usefulness. So its mandate was treated seriously: Translate an issue’s complexity into relevant knowledge for members and staff, and articulate the potential trade-offs associated with different courses of action. Said John Gibbons, the agency’s director, in 1984: “There are many advocates of particular solutions—even the scientific community is an advocate in its dealings with the Congress—but OTA is unique in its almost idealistic mandate to remain free of advocacy.” That restraint had some costs. OTA could leave both sides of a policy dispute dissatisfied: It would not bless anyone’s preferred solution, and it would not reduce a hard question to a recommendation lawmakers could simply adopt. But this was OTA’s own trade-off. The agency supplied Congress with the best available account of what a policy choice would do and avoided any suggestion about which choice to make.
Over the course of its life, OTA published roughly 750 products for its congressional clients across a bewildering scope of topics. As it happens, there are few policy domains where science and technology do not play a meaningful role. The work was substantial and consequential. Indeed, OTA staff may have been committed to impartiality, but they understood the stakes. After news reached staff that the agency was being disbanded, most chose to stay on till closing day, “vigorously pursuing its mission to the last,” reported The New York Times. “Even as they empty desks, pack boxes and circulate resumes, staff members working in offices a few blocks from the Capitol are rushing to complete and distribute as many studies as possible before the deadline.”
In the 1990s, despite its broad appeal across Congress and across the aisle, OTA became a minor casualty in a much larger fight over the federal budget. Certain members thought it wise to show the public that Congress, too, was tightening its belt as it simultaneously recommended eliminating a much broader array of federal programs. But it was hard to see the move as anything other than optics.
For one, OTA’s funding peaked at $21.3 million in 1995—in inflation-adjusted terms, less than the cost of returfing the grass on the National Mall. But OTA also paid for itself many, many times over. A single OTA study in 1994 on the Social Security Administration’s computer procurement policy saved the government an estimated $368 million—more than 16 times OTA’s budget that year. Its broader impact on evidence-based policymaking is harder to quantify in dollar terms. But as one analyst put it: “If conducting [an OTA study] costs less than one-tenth of one percent of the money at stake in a decision, and increases the odds that we’ll get the decision right, that is a considerable bargain.”
There have been calls for reconstituting OTA in some form or another since not long after it closed its doors. A notable one came in 2019, when a House appropriations committee approved $6 million to begin reopening OTA. (In 1995, the agency was defunded, but the statute creating it is still on the books.) In 2020, the bipartisan House Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress recommended “reestablishing and restructuring an improved” OTA. Indeed, no serious proposals—and there are a number—imagine simply recreating the agency as it existed in 1995. Analyses, including by the Congressional Research Service, have suggested a number of new design recommendations if it is one day brought back. In 2019 and again in 2023, a bipartisan, bicameral group folded some of these recommendations into companion bills that would have created an updated OTA.
However, the money did not survive the final appropriations process, the recommendation did not make it into the House’s eventual modernization package, and the bills stalled. Still, in recent years, Congress has repeatedly recognized the problem.
There have also been other efforts to provide Congress with more support. In 2019, the Government Accountability Office created a Science, Technology Assessment, and Analytics team, which now produces technology assessments, short explanatory “spotlights,” and audits of federal science and technology programs. It has done serious work, including on generative AI, deepfakes, biotechnology, and brain-computer interfaces. A reconstituted OTA could be viewed as duplicative.
But STAA is a team within an agency whose central job is auditing how the government spends money and carries out its programs. OTA solved a different problem: sorting through a barrage of information in order to clarify options, often in close partnership with lawmakers and their staff. As the Washington Post editorial board once argued: “GAO’s institutional culture centers on audits and investigations, and it lacks the hallmarks of OTA in its heyday,” which include “experts with whom legislators can build relationships.” Indeed, the relationships mattered as much as the mission. OTA staff attended meetings with lawmakers, commented on draft legislation, and generally made themselves accessible. Lawmakers even sat on OTA’s governing board. GAO, meanwhile, is not deeply embedded within Congress; it operates at arm’s length. An OTA annual report from 1981 proudly underscored the opposite: that the agency functioned as a kind of “shared staff.”
The OTA was a model of legislative expertise so distinctive that other democracies came to study it—and, in various forms, to borrow it. In the late 1980s, Britain sent a delegation to examine the agency, and in 1989, it established its own Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology. Germany followed with the Office of Technology Assessment at the Bundestag in 1990. So did France, Finland, Japan, and the European Parliament, among others. The agencies differed in their designs but generally reflected a shared idea that lawmakers confronting the consequences of new advancements in science and technology should not have to depend entirely on another branch of government, outside interests, or their own overextended staff. The great irony of the decision to shutter OTA was that so many others thought it a good enough idea to replicate themselves.
Even the White House stood up its own science and technology body. In 1976, it created the Office of Science and Technology Policy, which advises the president and coordinates policy across the executive branch, and which still exists. Only Congress decided it could do without its own source of independent judgment.
Naturally, as civilizational-stake issues like artificial intelligence mount, a reconstituted OTA is not the only solution to Congress’s capacity problem. For decades, the institution has been shedding staff, as have its support agencies. Between 1975 and 2015, the combined staffs of the Congressional Research Service, the Government Accountability Office, and the Congressional Budget Office fell by 45 percent, with minor fluctuations since. Over the past two decades, despite being charged with making the country’s laws and overseeing the entire federal government, Congress has allocated roughly one-tenth of one percent of the federal budget to itself. The result of this self-inflicted hollowing-out has probably not been more capable policymaking. For those who want Congress to do something useful, starving the institution has been an unhelpful approach.
Bringing back OTA should be one component of a broader effort to seriously invest in congressional capacity—to dispense with the idea that somehow, an ascetic legislature is capable of doing the work expected of it. A revived OTA alone is not coming to the rescue, but it is one easy and obvious and urgent place to start.
