Imagine if Congress had a clear-eyed guide to the technological upheavals shaping our lives. A team of in-house experts who could have flagged the risks of generative AI before ChatGPT went public, raised alarms about deepfakes before they flooded social media, and assessed the vulnerabilities in U.S. infrastructure before ransomware shut down pipelines.
For a time, Congress had exactly that, in the form of the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA). But lawmakers shuttered it 30 years ago, and we’re still feeling its absence today.
Created in 1972, the Office of Technology Assessment gave Congress something it almost never has: a reliable way to understand the science and technologies reshaping the world. The office’s reports didn’t tell lawmakers what to do. Instead, they laid out the risks and the benefits (so cleanly that members on opposite sides of an issue could wave the same report to make their case). The OTA was overseen by a 12‑member board, split evenly between Democrats and Republicans, with equal representation from the House and the Senate. In just over two decades, it produced over 750 studies, on everything from Alzheimer’s to automation.
“It was an impartial repository of interdisciplinary experts who would proactively assist Congress in understanding emerging technology,” says University of Washington law professor Ryan Calo, “and to do so at a time early enough in its life cycle that it had not become full of special interests that had not grown around it, like barnacles.”
But not everyone was pleased with OTA’s body of work. In 1980, Washington Times reporter Donald Lambro published Fat City: How Washington Wastes Your Taxes, arguing that the agency often focused on issues championed by Senator Ted Kennedy and other liberals. In his view, OTA’s studies were “duplicative, frequently shoddy, not altogether objective, and often ignored.” (Lambro’s criticisms were, ironically enough, arguably quite partisan: True, OTA sometimes revisited issues already studied by other agencies, but a 1977 Government Accountability Office (GAO) review noted that OTA’s output made “significant contributions in areas of concern to Congress.”
That sentiment carried into the Reagan era. OTA’s sharply critical assessments of President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). Pitched at the height of the Cold War as a revolutionary system of space‑ and ground‑based weapons capable of intercepting Soviet missiles in flight, SDI struck supporters as a technological moonshot. OTA’s assessment was a splash of cold water: the office warned that the program’s staggering cost and ambitious scope offered little assurance it could actually shield the nation from a Soviet attack.