The GAO option

The GAO has been expanding its science policy team. In 2018, the agency established a Center for Strategic Foresight to serve as its “principal hub for identifying, monitoring, and analyzing emerging issues facing policymakers.” Experts in foresight, planning, and futures thinking scan for emerging issues that will have an impact on government and society. Trends that the Center will tackle can be found in the GAO’s Strategic Plan 2018-2023 (gao.gov/assets/700/690262.pdf).

At the beginning of 2019, GAO launched its STAA team to provide Congress with technology assessments, compiling best practices in the engineering sciences. The team will audit federal S&T programs and establish an audit innovation lab to explore, pilot, and deploy advanced analytic capabilities for auditing emerging technologies.

STAA’s new two-page Science & Tech Spotlight reports, which summarize technology innovations and relate them to government and national security policy, complement GAO’s in-depth evaluations and assessment reports, providing overviews of key topics in the field and summarizing emerging innovations in a policy context. Unfortunately, these reports are buried within Reports and Testimonies in the left-hand navigation. The GAO@100 site (gao.gov/technology-science#) lists them about three-quarters of the way down the page. Alternatively, search spotlight. Then, click on any of the blue Science & Tech Spotlight boxes that interest you.

While Spotlights contain references, contact information for one or two experts in the field should be added. Reaching experts when needed was deemed essential by congresspersons in the NAPA, Ash, and Belfer reports. Making congressional staff contact the GAO to “unmask” an expert adds a level of unnecessary bureaucracy—Millennials are more likely to Google to find someone to call, expert or not.

In some sense, GAO’s STAA unit is taking on some of the same work as OTA did in the past, but are static reports really what’s needed today? It takes GAO too long to issue a report, and if you are not a committee chair, your request doesn’t necessarily get priority in the queue. Will doubling STAA’s current staff size of 70 to 140 FTEs (full-time employees), as the GAO intends, make a difference?

In their April 15, 2021, blog post, “Recommendations to Strengthen GAO’s Science, Technology Assessment, and Analytics Program” (lincolnpolicy.org/2021/recommendations-to-strengthen-gaos-science-technology-assessment-and-analytics-program), Zach Graves and Dan Lips outline five recommendations:

1. Encourage STAA to utilize “short term project-based rotators to enhance their talent pool and build
   expert networks.”
2. Encourage STAA to expand outreach to members and staff, potentially creating “newsletters or other mechanisms to engage with staff.”
3. Encourage research independence at STAA.
4. Increase STAA’s visibility and independence with a line item, moving “towards the relationship model between CRS and the Library of Congress of sharing support resources but also having a measure of operational independence.”
5. Fully fund GAO’s FY2022 budget request.

A blast from the past

Between 1974 and 1995, the OTA provided Congress with multidisciplinary and authoritative analyses of S&T issues. Funding for this research ended in an era of congressional budget cuts, but the agency’s authorization under the Technology Assessment Act of 1972 (2 U.S.C. §§ 471-481) was never repealed. The OTA Legacy is preserved at Princeton (princeton.edu/~ota) and by the Federation of American Scientists (ota.fas.org/otareports).

OTA produced approximately 750 technology assessments and background papers at the behest of congressional committee chairs on topics ranging from healthcare and biotechnology, defense, and space to energy and telecommunications, computing and information technology, the environment, and education. Although these “buckets” helped organize the research years ago, today’s emerging technologies and scientific questions can span disciplines and require a structure that is more fluid.

The average OTA report was more than 200 pages, overly detailed with unnecessary background information, and took far too long to complete (an average of 18 months), meaning crucial deadlines for timely congressional action were being missed. As Robert D. Atkinson notes in his paper, “A Fresh Start for OTA: Creating the Lean, Dynamic Technology Agency Congress Needs Today,” “the old OTA generally avoided making explicit policy recommendations … that practice often meant that Congress did not get a full analysis of the impacts of different policy choices” (lincolnpolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/ATKINSON.pdf).

With OTA gone, CRS and GAO tried to provide advice to Congress on S&T, but their resources were stretched. Where did Congress turn? To lobbyists, of course, and we know how that turned out.

The Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress (modernizecongress.house.gov) issued 24 recommendations, the highlights of which were addressed in “Dysfunction in Washington and Remedies for What Ails Congress,” ONLINE SEARCHER, March/April 2020, pp. 22–29. The committee’s suggestion to re-establish an “improved” OTA that would “provide nonpartisan information and policy analysis to Member offices, support legislative branch agencies in their examination of new technologies, focus on general oversight and policy, and facilitate peer reviews of potential new technologies” has gotten the most press coverage (fedscoop.com/office-of-technology-assessment-modernization-congress).

The House Appropriations Committee authorized $6 million to reestablish OTA in 2019, and the bipartisan Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress voted unanimously to restore and reconfigure the agency; 2020 appropriations included $40 million for GAO’s expanded S&T capacity. The FY2022 budget request does not indicate how much money will be allocated to the provision of technical assistance to Congress on S&T issues, but GAO-21-510T explains how that money will be apportioned (gao.gov/assets/gao-21-510t.pdf).

Originally set to disband on Feb. 1, 2020, Select Committee members felt that there was still more they could do. They requested and were granted permission to continue through the end of the 116th Congress. On Jan. 4, 2021, the House reauthorized the Select Committee for the 117th Congress, so there is more to come.

The CRS option

The CRS provides information and analysis through original reports, issue briefs, and summaries of existing literature, as well as confidential research services. Its staff are known to be quick, effective compilers of current research and historians of previous legislative efforts. All of the various studies issued to date recommend that Congress expand its S&T expertise at CRS. There is a lot that the librarians at CRS could do to fill the gaps identified by the various studies.

According to the August 2019 Bipartisan Policy Center report, “Congress Needs the Office of Technology Assessment to Keep Up With Science and Technology” (bipartisanpolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Congress-Needs-the-Office-of-Technology-Assessment-to-Keep-up-with-Science-and-Technology-002.pdf), the assessment process of OTA and STAA are remarkably similar, beginning with receipt of an assessment request from Congress. What’s needed is a proactive approach to getting S&T information into the hands of members of Congress and their staffs.

What members say they need is an understanding of the basics about each scientific issue; up-to-date, plain language reading about each issue; experts to contact should they wish to dig further; and opportunities to network with these experts over time. Librarians would call these LibGuides, augmented by 52 experts who would agree to write one blog post per year on an aspect of their chosen field of study. The LibGuides and blogs could be written by researchers in academic institutions or commercial entities, who would give the full range of thought about a subject. Short video interviews with scholars in the field could be added to the site while webinars and in-person events could be scheduled, all recorded and archived on the site. There is no reason to limit access to Congress; making current research available to the public could only spark innovation.

THE INFO PRO APPROACH

Any librarian weighing the options being discussed would be astounded to hear the word “report” repeated so many times. An info pro would approach the situation as follows:

1.  Conduct a horizon scan each year, identifying tech topics to be updated through the first year, reassessing the list each year, and establishing a timeline of urgency for addressing each (high/medium/low scoring). This might result in a future study report, but that is only the beginning. Reviewing environmental assessments conducted by other reputed organizations should yield a list of topics that scholars, as well as members of Congress, rank in order to assure that the most pressing issues are addressed in Year 1 (and result in a comprehensive list that is reassessed each year). The scans should be part of a competitiveness study that evaluates how the United States is faring compared with the approaches being taken in other countries and include positioning all on a tech hype cycle graphic. The goal should be the development of an innovation policy for the country.

2.  As appropriate, conduct literature, scoping, or systematic reviews for each topic, creating annotated bibliographies and synthesizing material to produce alerts, fact sheets, and issue briefs.

3.  Take the top X number of tech topics and build research guides for each, beginning with the essential elements covered in the new STAA spotlights. In place of the list of GAO works and references, the research guides would include an annotated bibliography, a list of experts for each topic (including contact information so that anyone looking at the guide would know whom to call—a “must have” noted by the reviews conducted in 2019). Members of Congress lack the ability to judge which expert is worth listening to when it comes to S&T, so this list is essential.

4.  Create an advisory panel for each topic. Using the Institute of Education Science’s What Works Clearinghouse as a model (ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc), CRS could conduct the initial literature search, and these advisors could identify significant research to synthesize for the topic-specific sites.

5.  Establish monthly breakfasts for in-person presentations by an expert, the live streaming of the webinars, and the recording of the video for later viewing.

6.  Invite one expert per week (from academia or the commercial sector) to blog about the topic, their research, or related topics. Interested parties inside Congress as well as the general public should be able to subscribe to these and be alerted when a new blog posts. Engaging the public is crucial to making sure that those interested in a subject hear about new research.

7.  Managing ad hoc requests from committees for research support should be coordinated by some entity overseeing this entire program.

 A stream of information is the basis for decision making, so literature searches will need to be updated as new research is published. Regardless of the agency responsible for conducting the horizon scans or the process through which the emerging technologies are tagged as a priority (for immediate investigation), there remains the issue of ongoing monitoring of research being conducted for each of these technology issues, newsfeeds being established to keep the researchers informed, and alerts being set up for congressional staff who are interested in specific topics. These feeds could update issue webpages while the researchers synthesize the literature and issue briefs and longer reports, as warranted.

The best way forward

If Congress is to work smarter, the question is, how? If the U.S. is to be competitive, significant changes must occur. As Sarah Foxen and Chris Tyler blogged Dec. 18, 2019 (blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2019/12/18/legislative-science-advice-is-a-powerful-tool-yet-the-majority-of-parliamentarians-around-the-world-dont-have-access-to-it), “a proactive advisory service that scans the political and technological horizon and provides summaries of rigorous research evidence” is needed. Science advisers must “know how to find research and information and also how to evaluate it, to be able to synthesize information, and communicate it in a concise, accessible and impartial format.”

How can we restore Congress’s foresight and analytic capabilities? Through horizon scans, competitiveness analyses, and future studies. How can we help Congress formulate the right questions, using reasoned policy determinants to arrive at the best policies? By creating entities that can adapt to the age of Google and Wikipedia. Congress asked experts to weigh in on the best way to proceed; multiple reports have been written. Their recommendations differ more in approach than substance.