The Politics of Expertise in Congress: The Rise and Fall of the Office of Technology Assessment (review)

To lessen its dependence on executive branch agencies and special-interest groups for scientific and technical information and analysis, the United States Congress established the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) in 1972. Like the legislative branch’s other support agencies—the Congressional Research Service, the General Accounting Office, and the Congressional Budget Office—OTA was set up as an independent advisory body with broad fact-gathering powers. Skeptics of the need for, and the desirability of, such an entity were never wholly won over to the idea, and internal political struggles over what topics would or would not be addressed by the new agency never subsided. Nevertheless, OTA gradually established a reputation for thoroughness, competence, and evenhandedness in its reports, which covered an enormous range of science- and technology-related public policy concerns. This breadth and depth were made possible by the agency’s ability to convene experts temporarily from across the land for each of its major assessments. Quality work, of course, does not always ensure longevity, even within bureaucracies. In a move that OTA’s supporters viewed as strikingly shortsighted and gratuitous, the newly emplaced Republican Congress voted to terminate the agency in 1995, as part of its larger governmental belt-tightening program.

Bruce Bimber has used this innovative experiment in governmental advisory apparatus to examine the interplay of technical expertise and politics within Congress. As a political science monograph (the heart of which served as Bimber’s doctoral dissertation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), The Politics of Expertise in Congress succeeds admirably. Throughout his concise and thoughtful study, Bimber remains appropriately cautious, never claiming anything more than an accounting of the politics of expertise within the legislative branch itself. Moreover, he is careful to point out that his book is not a history of OTA, despite its coverage of the agency’s entire life span and its reliance on historical examples. Lest readers of Technology and Culture overlook his caveat, however, it is important to emphasize that his study falls short as history, in that its underlying research skips over a vast terrain of primary source material, and its focused analysis leaves little room for consideration of personal, bureaucratic, or public contingencies. To pick but one example, Bimber provides few insights into the OTA staff itself. What disciplines did they represent, and what was the basis of their expertise? What kind of turnover rate was there? What roles did they play in initiating and shaping congressional requests for OTA studies? What were the organizational and geographical demographics of the experts whom OTA hired as outside consultants?

Bimber’s discussion of OTA’s operations under the directorship of John Gibbons during the 1980s and early 1990s is perhaps the most nuanced and insightful part of the book. From my perspective, the opposite is true of his treatment of the agency’s demise—presented in a chapter written after the completion of his dissertation—which comes across as uncritical and naive. Basing his assessment on interviews with participants, whose interpretations he accepted at face value, Bimber merely repeats their often self-serving explanations. While these justifications were no doubt truthful as far as they went, they did not capture the whole story—especially the undercurrents of political resentment that went largely unstated publicly. President Clinton’s selection of OTA’s Gibbons to head the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy and to serve as the president’s science adviser (an appointment unmentioned by Bimber), for example, only strengthened those perceptions that political biases had never really disappeared from the agency. To downplay the inherent political nature of OTA (whether inherent within the agency, or external in how it was used by others) is to underestimate an important part of the agency’s history and of the characteristics of expert advice to government.

If Bimber...