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Art: Olivia James |
With one report, the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) saved the federal government enough money to fund the Congressional research agency for a century. But despite success in saving money and the backing of powerful Republicans and Democrats, the office couldn't save itself. By the end of January 1996, the last remaining cleanup work will have been completed, records will be archived, and the 23-year-old OTA--created to inform Congress on emerging issues in technology and outline options for managing the impacts of these technologies--will cease to exist.
Although his was a relatively small office, the hotly-contested battle to eliminate the OTA led Assistant Director Clyde Behney to continue his mop-up operation even while 800,000 other federal employees were furloughed during the November government shutdown. "I thought it was essential we finish," Behney said with a gallows chuckle.
Some of the last reports to come out of the OTA were particularly relevant to environment and health, including studies on antibiotic-resistant bacteria, biologically based technology for pest control, the Human Genome Project, and environmental policy tools. Along with the OTA staff of 200, other victims of the budget cutters' scalpels were OTA research projects that could have affected government policy toward everyone from truckdrivers to space scientists.
Debatable Value
The proponents of slashing the OTA say the research agency was redundant in a time of shrinking federal dollars. Senator Connie Mack (R-Florida), the head of the Senate's Legislative Branch Appropriations Subcommittee, said of the office which was founded in 1972 as a bipartisan agency, "The OTA is a luxury we can no longer afford."
In fact, the cost to fund the OTA was about $23 million annually--a tiny fraction of a percent of the federal budget (equal to the income tax contribution of 4,000 average taxpayers). But even bipartisan attempts to save the office failed. "Congress has made a tragic error in choosing to eliminate the OTA, one that it will regret for a long time," said Senator Edward M. Kennedy (D-Massachusetts). "Why in the world we would choose to drain this outstanding reservoir of expertise is still a mystery to me."
Adding to the irony is evidence that the OTA may have saved far more money than it cost to operate. For example, in 1989 proposals were put forth to screen elderly Americans for high cholesterol. The National Cholesterol Education Program advocated that everyone know their cholesterol levels, and if those levels were high, that treatment was given to reduce cholesterol. "Everyone was in favor of screening," recalls Behney, who headed the OTA's health, education, and environment division. "Health organizations wanted it; congressmen wanted it; the elderly wanted it. Yet when we analyzed what was involved we realized that not only was screening going to cost taxpayers $5 billion in Medicare funds, we also could not show that such screening would result in any health benefit to the elderly." The result: Congress turned down legislation to fund screening.
The medical community is still undecided whether screening is worthwhile. At the recent annual meeting of the American Heart Association, Curt Furberg, professor of medicine at Bowman Gray School of Medicine at Wake Forest University, cited screening of elderly for cholesterol as one of many health programs favored by physicians that have no proven benefit. Furberg agrees with the OTA that, in the face of unproven benefits, funding for screening was unwarranted. "With the money we saved on that one item," Behney estimated, "we could have operated for 90 years." Behney estimates that in its 23-year lifespan the office spent less than half a billion dollars.
In another example the OTA arguably saved the equivalent of more than half its annual budget by concluding in a report that state and federal offices should not have to regulate technology involved in special care units for the elderly. That 1992 report, which was accepted by Congress, saved an estimated $14 million. The report also suggested that the government would save money by allowing Medicare to pay for mammography screening, pneumonia and influenza vaccines, and Pap smears for the elderly. Each of these proposals later became law.
A Senate aide, familiar with the debate over the OTA, suggested that the agency met its demise because it wandered outside the scope of its founders. "It turned into a 200-employee agency that did no research on its own. It merely called together panels of experts, got their opinions, and delivered those opinions to Congress," the aide said.
Jerry Taylor, an environmental resources expert at the Cato Institute in Washington, DC, said, "To suggest that the OTA could provide some service that could not be produced through academic research groups, independent think tanks such as RAND, the Brookings Institute, the American Enterprise Institute and the National Academy of Sciences, the National Institutes of Health, the Government Accounting Office, the Congressional Research Service, and the Congressional Budget Office is just laughable." Taylor also questioned the credit the OTA has claimed for the projects in which it saved the government millions saying, "Theirs was far from a unique opinion."
What may also have hurt the OTA was its lack of recognition among the rank-and-file members of Congress. The Senate aide said, "If you polled members of Congress about what the OTA accomplished, most of them would just stare blankly--if they even knew the office existed."
The batttle over the OTA and its budget was a dogfight in Congress that was finally resolved in the budget conference committee. According to Taylor, this doesn't bode well for other smaller agencies as politicians begin to see them as hits on a list of budget-saving kills. David Rall, former director of the NIEHS and a former assistant surgeon general, said that other smaller federal agencies might have to keep looking over their shoulders as budget cutters look for other places to trim federal expenditures. "The smaller agencies have a harder time defending themselves and don't have as many patrons, but again they don't cost a lot of money," Rall said.
The demise of the OTA was lamented by some. "The loss of the OTA simply means," said Peter Montague, editor of Rachel's Environment and Health Weekly, "that Congress is going to be dumber than it used to be--if you can imagine that.
"OTA was doing a really important job," Montague said. "We didn't always agree with their analyses but we know that the death of the OTA will be an immeasurably great loss to the nation's ability to get the facts straight." Cato's Taylor asserts, however, that the idea that the OTA would give an unbiased result--unlike that received from private or academic think tanks--is faulty. "Congressional committees provide answers the chairman of the committee wants," Taylor says. "The OTA's positions were no less biased than anyone else's."
Other disagree. "The decision to eliminate the OTA will result in Congress making regulatory decisions that affect billions of dollars and those decisions will be made with more ignorance," said Rall. Maybe and maybe not, according to Ernest Stout of the research and graduate studies program at Virginia Polytechnic University in Blacksburg: "The demise of the OTA means that Congress will no longer have these experts at their beck and call. Various science and technology committees will continue to need expert opinion and advice. My guess is that they will contract that work out to think tanks."
Work Left Undone
When the battle was over, there were dozens of OTA projects underway or on the drawing board. Behney said many of the projects were diminished in scope, reduced to background papers, or simply dropped. Though opponents of the OTA say there was duplication in some of these reports, Behney says he doesn't know if any government agency is picking up the pieces.
Aquaculture. During the 1980s, farming of aquatic plants and animals became the fastest growing sector of U.S. agriculture. Despite this growth, the country has been increasing its importation of foreign fishery products--to the tune of $10 billion a year, the largest agricultural contributor to the trade deficit.
As requested by the House Committee on Merchant Marine and Fisheries, the OTA planned a major study of emerging new technologies that would have had the potential to influence development of the U.S. market. The OTA was able to produce only a couple of background reports on the subject, Behney said.
Handguns. David Satcher, head of the Centers for Disease Control, has called violence one of the leading public health problems in the United States. An OTA study would have considered ways of developing technologies for tracking ammunition and controlling the inadvertent use of handguns and exploring technologies designed to make handguns safer with mechanisms such as trigger locks, magazine safety devices, load indicators, and storage devices.
A second part of the study, requested by the Senate Committee on Finance Technology Assessment Board, would have looked at the technology surrounding the idea of tracking handgun ammunition as a way of deterring crime and tracking criminals.
Service economy jobs. Services jobs account for 75% of the nation's employment and output, but among those are jobs which offer wages and benefits comparable to manufacturing industries, as well as jobs with low pay, few benefits, and little chance for advancement.
The study requested by the House Committee on Education and Labor would have analyzed labor markets and their linkage to technology and considered policies concerning training, work organizations, labor law, business modernization, and job creation in the services field.
Medical workforce. The Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources requested that the OTA analyze federal programs that fund education for health professionals. The programs were designed to boost the workforce of medical professionals in underserved areas.
Long-term care. Persons with disabilities and the elderly receive various support from federal, state, and local agencies, and programs to assist these groups are continuously being proposed. In recognition of changes in technology that could be affected by these proposals, the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee requested that the OTA attempt to assess the various criteria upon which the elderly and disabled would receive aid.
A similar study, requested by the Special Senate Committee on Aging and the Senate Committee on Small Business through its Subcommittee on Innovation, Manufacturing and Technology, was supposed to look at residential design technologies for the elderly and the disabled.
Still other OTA studies were truncated. For example, the OTA completed reports on the Human Genome Project, but didn't have time to do a critical assessment of the ethical questions surrounding the mapping of human genes. Those questions include the possibility that technology will be able to predict future disease through genetic testing and will bring with it dilemmas of reproductive issues, insurance coverage, or even job selection.
While the OTA is gone, it won't be necessarily forgotten. Part of the technology that led Congress to create the OTA will preserve the office's record for posterity. Its reports have a home on several Internet sites, including the National Academy of Sciences, Princeton University, the Library of Congress, and the Government Printing Office. The OTA's own World Wide Web page went dark in December 1995.
Ed Susman
Last Update: May 7, 1997