Taking a little break today to point to an article that explains a lot about why scientific denialism and technological misinformation persists in the United States Congress today – the ignorantly defunded and consequently defunct U.S. Office of Technology Assessment.
I’ll let Mark Hoofnagle tell it:
It used to be, for about 20 years (from 1974 to 1995), there was an office on the Hill, named the Office of Technology Assessment, which worked for the legislative branch and provided non-partisan scientific reports relevant to policy discussions. It was a critical office, one that through thorough and complete analysis of the scientific literature gave politicians common facts from which to decide policy debates. In 1994, with the new Republican congress, the office was eliminated for the sake of budget cuts, but the cost in terms of damage to the quality of scientific debate on policy has been incalculable. Chris Mooney described it as Congress engaging in “a stunning act of self-lobotomy” in his book the Republican War on Science (RWOS at Amazon).
The fact of the matter is that our government is currently operating without any real scientific analysis of policy. Any member can introduce whatever set of facts they want, by employing some crank think tank to cherry-pick the scientific literature to suit any ideological agenda. This should be a non-partisan issue. Everybody should want the government to be operating from one set of facts, ideally facts investigated by an independent body within the congress that is fiercely non-partisan, to set the bounds of legitimate debate. Everybody should want policy and policy debates to be based upon sound scientific ground. Everybody should want evidence-based government.
Maybe I’m a little too young to remember the Office of Technology Assessment, because I can’t recall ever having been aware of the OTA’s existence. I would have assumed that there was some sort of office or oversight committee that made these sort of recommendations to legislators, but it appears that this function has been outsourced to privatized, partisan think tanks for the last twelve years. Chutzpah!
I would like to ask, as Mark does in his article, that anyone concerned about the status of scientific discourse and progress in this country write a letter to their representatives in congress. There are a lot of funding opportunities for cleantech startups and innovators at the state and federal level, but the policy makers holding the purse strings have to be able to make sound scientific decisions before those appropriations are appropriately considered.
For the sake of sound science, bring back the OTA!!!
- Curtiss Martin
