VIEWPOINTS : ANALYSIS PARALYSIS : Congress’ Office of Technology Assessment is the triumph of data over insight.

Picture Nostradamus as a brilliant MIT grad student strolling through the Rayburn Building spouting fortune cookie policy options and you’ll have a pretty good sense of the Office of Technology Assessment: a touch nerdy, a bit glib and virtually irrelevant. OTA is exactly the sort of agency that Congress doesn’t need.

“It’s an example of the kind of thing we shouldn’t have in government,” asserts Carnegie-Mellon University President Richard Cyert. “It was one of those nice ideas that looked like an orderly way to deal with problems but eventually takes on a life of its own. It really duplicates a lot of what goes on elsewhere.”

OTA has enjoyed a recent flurry of favorable publicity. In fact, the OTA has done an excellent job of cultivating relationships with the press. The publication of an OTA report is usually worth a story. Unfortunately, media coverage is usually all the action an OTA report inspires.

Born in 1972--”at a time when Congress was coming into its own and distrusting the information from the executive branch,” says American Enterprise Institute’s Norman Ornstein--OTA was conceived both as Congress’ in-house technical counsel and as a new technology “early warning system” for policy planning. Instead, OTA has become a nonpartisan document generator that is usually content to substitute comprehensiveness for insight.

Easy Platitudes

For a tidy $17-million-plus a year, OTA does an excruciatingly thorough job of capturing the conventional wisdoms of technical experts and packaging them into reports. Topics range from geothermal energy to “Star Wars.”

OTA wants to be nonpartisan so these reports don’t actually make recommendations; they only list policy options. One mammoth 500-page opus, “Technology and the American Economic Transition,” fully four years in the making, recently concluded that the American economy was, yes, “at a crossroads.” What’s more, the report added, new technologies, the rapid increase in foreign trade and changing tastes and values require “an unflinching re-examination of the way businesses are managed.”

Bet you hadn’t heard that one before.

Similarly, OTA’s “Advanced Materials” (ceramics, metals, composites, etc.) report concludes that the United States is falling behind--who else?--Japan and that prudent public policy dictates that we encourage long-term investment and facilitate government/university/industry collaboration in materials process research and development.

No kidding. In this respect, OTA is less a Nostradamus than Casablanca’s Claude Rains (I’m shocked--shocked!--to find gambling in this establishment!) Does anyone in Congress take that kind of policy recommendation seriously?

Look to the past. In 1981, OTA released a 331-page report, “Impacts of Applied Genetics,” that was hailed as a superb survey of the commercial prospects for biotechnology. The report unsurprisingly concluded that genetic engineering “will have a broad impact on the future.” Unfortunately, that report gave short shrift to what has proven to be one of the biggest barriers to commercializing the new technology--appropriate government regulation. The notion that one can meaningfully discuss the commercial implications of a technology that redefines life without assessing the regulatory environment is just silly.

That’s why OTA is both symbol and substance of what’s wrong with the way Washington tries to craft technology policy. Because the future is treated like an intellectual exercise, the “policy options” don’t resonate with the real world. It’s the triumph of analysis over usefulness.

OTA Director John Gibbons argues that “in the fuzzy marketplace of appropriations committees and congressional chairmen,” his agency is doing fine. To some extent that’s true--but Congress is always willing to have taxpayers pay for its own conveniences. What makes OTA especially convenient is that it’s so safe. Unlike a General Accounting Office or a Congressional Budget Office, whose audits and analyses can make or break a policy initiative, OTA rarely offends either Republicans or Democrats. Whatever provocative analysis and insights there might be are flensed out in the bipartisan congressional review process. To that extent, OTA gives nonpartisanship a bad name.

What Congress really needs is advice--not analysis. The organizations--both public and private--that cope best with new technology don’t suffer from analysis paralysis. They solicit advice--and choose to accept it, reject it or modify it. Then they act.

This was once true of the White House--but the Office of Science and Technology Policy, as leading science and technology organizations have rightly complained, has been allowed to fall into disuse. That’s a tremendous mistake because it leaves the governing branches without any coherent voices on science and technology policy. Allan Bromley, the new White House science adviser, has his work cut out for him in any efforts to coordinate the nation’s science and technology priorities.

One-Armed Scientists

There should be a raucous public debate about the merging technologies of the day. The Strategic Defense Initiative, biotechnology, factory automation and medical technology all evoke spirited comment and provocative views from every portion of the political and technological spectrum. A congressional think tank that primarily totes up what people think offers marginal value to that debate.

“The fact is that OTA now has to be rethought to make it something that has a real impact on how Congress views technology,” says AEI’s Ornstein, “or it will continue to slip between the cracks or be forgotten.”

After listening to several scientists testify before his committee, a senator complained that he wanted only one-armed scientists to testify--because he was tired of hearing--”On one hand . . . but on the other hand.” If OTA had any more hands, it would be an octopus.

Congress and its staff should stop using OTA as a policy crutch. Either reconstitute OTA so that it can offer insights that are as weighty as the reports or shut it down. We don’t really need an agency that views the future through a prism of platitudes.