Steven Holt: “For 23 years, Congress had the benefit of a really excellent organization, the Office of Technology Assessment. The OTA…”

“For 23 years, Congress had the benefit of a really excellent organization, the Office of Technology Assessment. The OTA helped Congress look at the policy implications of new technologies. Then 16 years ago, OTA was defunded. When Congress turned out the lights, they argued that other organizations would provide what OTA did--think tanks, academies, universities. We now have 16 years of evidence that we have not gotten from these other sources what we got from OTA. We need OTA now more than ever, and my amendment would shift a mere $2.5 million into OTA to breathe life back into this important agency that had a great record of improving congressional decisionmaking, preventing tax dollar waste, and generally improving the debate on many policy issues. OTA is still on the books; it was simply defunded and, with this amendment, can be funded again. The money comes from a well-funded, little used trust fund for Capitol building revitalization. The OTA produced thorough, balanced nonpartisan studies on a huge variety of policy-relevant subjects. Listen to some of the reports, all produced by OTA in the years before it was defunded 16 years ago: Adverse Reaction to Vaccines, Retiring Old Cars to Save Gasoline and Reduce Emissions, Environmental Impact of Bioenergy Crop Production, Testing in Schools, Treatment of Alzheimer's Disease. Think about it; these studies, a few of the many on issues of great concern to us today, were written before 1995.…”