The Scientific American recently asked its readers what questions they would like U. S. presidential candidates to answer, according to this blog post.  This survey is part of  The Citizens Agenda’s effort to have election coverage reflect  the interests of the citizens.

In summarizing his readers’ interests  Zivkovic said, “…all the questions are trying to get at this core issue: are the candidates reality-based?”

The largest number of questions submitted by Observations’ readers were about science education and the role of government in science.  Among many questions about funding for science education and research was one about OTA, “Will you support re-establishment of the Office of Technology Assessment to aid officials in proper evaluation of complex scientific issues? If not, why?”

Other science topics nominated for discussion are evolution and climate change.

In his  blog, “Republicans vs. Science: Ranking the Candidates,” Thompson evaluates the science and technology  policies of the Republican candidates.    Newt Gingrich had the highest ranking – even though, as Speaker, he abolished the Office of Technology Assessment, “a move reminiscent of Nixon abolishing the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy,” according to Thompson.

Bruce Bartlett also points out Gingrich’s inconsistencies in his N.Y. Times  Economix blog, “Gingrich and the Destruction of Congressional Expertise.” He said that professional Congressional staff members – especially those with technical expertise – had been an obstacle to Mr. Gingrich’s “grandiose schemes.”  “To remove this obstacle, Mr. Gingrich did everything in his power to dismantle Congressional institutions that employed people with the knowledge, training and experience to know a harebrained idea when they saw it,” according to Bartlett.

“In addition to decimating committee budgets,” Bartlett added, “he also abolished two really useful Congressional agencies, the Office of Technology Assessment and the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations. The former brought high-level scientific expertise to bear on legislative issues and the latter gave state and local governments an important voice in Congressional deliberations.”

Lorelei Kelly, in her Huffington Post article, “Dumb By Design: Gingrich’s Lobotomy of Congress and Today’s Dysfunction,”  mentions Gingrich’s  Contract for America,  which “wiped out the shared system of expert knowledge and analysis inside Congress. The bill made Congress dumb — on purpose. ”

The resulting brainpower losses included the Office of Technology Assessment,  the bipartisan Democratic Study Group, the Arms Control and Foreign Policy Caucus, and shared committee staffs.

Similar sentiments were echoed in:

Government Executive’s  Fed Blog, “ Defunct Agency Still Missed,” by Charles S. Clark;

the  Washington Post’s  Federal Eye, “When Congress wiped an agency off the map,” by Ed O’Keefe;

“Closing a federal agency and making Congress dumber — thank Newt Gingrich” posted in Under the Mountain Bunker; and

Econbrowser, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the beancounters,” by Menzie Chinn.

Washington Insider discussed the amendments to the 2012 Legislative Branch Appropriations Bill  including one submitted by Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ)  to re-establish OTA:

AMENDMENT TO H.R. 2551:
SEC. 211. There is appropriated, for salaries and expenses of the Office of Technology Assessment as authorized by the Technology Assessment Act of 1972 (2 U.S.C.471 et seq.),  hereby derived from the amount provided in this Act for the payment to the House Historic Buildings  Revitalization Trust Fund, $2,500,000.

According to Climate Science Watch blog   Michael Halpern of the Union of Concerned Scientists, as well as a number of other scientific,  transparency, public health, and public interest groups, urged members to support Holt’s amendment.

The ASBMB Policy Blotter  blog post pointed out that that OTA “was a leader in practicing and encouraging delivery of public services in innovative and inexpensive ways.”

The amendment was voted down 176 to 235.  The results of the roll call vote can be seen here.

The Washington Post is sponsoring “America’s Next Great Pundit Contest.” The Post received 4,800 entries from people who hoped to write better commentary than they had been reading.   The Post selected ten entries to move to the next level of the competition. The winner of the contest will be  hired to write a weekly column.

Among the ten finalists was the Nobel Prize -winning physicist, Burton Richter,  who opined about  the need for Congress to  re-establish the Office of Technology Assessment. He pointed out that a 1974 OTA report, “Drug Bioequivalence,” is relevant in recent discussions of health care costs.  He also recommended  one of his favorite OTA reports, “Renewing Our Energy Future,” which discussed the potential of secondary sources for biofuels.

According to Richter, “A new OTA will not settle all the arguments because there are political dimensions to major technical issues, but at least it can help Congress arrive at a common starting point for complicated legislation.”

Kevin Drum of Mother Jones News kindly provided a  summary of the columns at “Pundit Watch” for those wishing to save a little time.

A blog entry points to several articles that are calling for OTA to be restarted, and says that OTA should be brought back because “…Congress is literally flying blind. There is no body of consensus information that our legislators can use for the purposes of decision-making; but there is a heck of a lot of nonsense being fed to them constantly.”

The Science Cheerleader recently met with Rep. Holt and Congressional Fellow Will O’Neal to talk about reopening OTA. She discusses their meeting in her blog post.  The Science Cheerleader points out, “The Executive Branch (Obama) has no shortage of science and engineering advice on policy issues as well as programs to open bidirectional conversations with the public on key policy issues. Why shouldn’t Congress have the same resources available to them?”

An article gives a brief history of OTA and argues that the Congress needs technical support much more today than when OTA was orginally created.  The article also points out that OTA is not just for scientists:

Ironically, the scientific community’s strong support for OTA may have created the false impression that OTA primarily served to support scientists. This is like saying that television weather announcers primarily serve to support professional meteorologists—which is, of course, precisely backwards. Meteorologists already know the weather. The role of television weather announcers is to take meteorological forecasts, turn them into language the rest of us can understand, and enable us all to make better plans. The scientific community supported OTA not because it benefitted scientists directly, but because it enabled members of Congress to make better decisions about policy issues with significant scientific and technological components.

A podcast about science advice to Congress from a session at the AAAS annual meeting says, “Time to bring back the Office of Technology Assessment.”  Statements by Rep. Rush Holt and Lou Branscomb offered reasons for restoring OTA.

In a column (interview) about the state of U. S. science, Rush Holt (D-NJ) says he is troubled that many people have a bad attitude about science.  He said, “This attitude is seen with the latest stimulus package, where people go on the House floor — members of Congress — and ridicule the idea of funding science. They did!”

To explain why he thinks that science is important, Holt said,

It is from science that we get the innovation that provides productivity and growth for the future economy, so it is critically important for our economic well-being. It also adds to our quality of life in material ways. But I think most scientists still feel that there is a higher calling to what they do, that understanding how things work is an end in itself, and it’s a glorious end in itself.

Where legislators get their science information, according to Rep. Holt:

Well, in many cases, they don’t. They get it from whoever was the last person to visit their office, who may or may not know anything about science….

We should return to vibrancy the Office of Technology Assessment, which was abolished 14 years ago now. OTA was a terrific resource for anticipating the [scientific] questions that were coming up. It worked very well, and we can restore it just as it was, to very good effect.

About plans to reinstate OTA, Holt said, “I try again every year. I’m trying again this year.”

A recent magazine column scores technology predictions for 2008 and makes new predictions for 2009.  One of the predictions is that a cabinet-level technology officer will be created in the new administration, which is based upon an idea floated by President Obama during his campaign.   Pointing out the need for such an office, the column states, “Since the Congress dismantled the Office of Technology Assessment more than a decade ago, the federal government has been forced to deal with rapidly evolving technologies with little or no independent guidance and no central point from which to make national policies to advance technology utilization. I’m all for changing that.”