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Excellent, excellent idea. What's interesting about all this isn't that this is a new idea by Warren – it's that the Government had an office like this but it

by atonse 7y ago

Excellent, excellent idea. What's interesting about all this isn't that this is a new idea by Warren – it's that the Government had an office like this but it was closed down by Republican leadership in the mid 90s. I have a (truly genuine) question for Republican techies here (really, really not trying to point fingers or start a political argument) – when you see that Newt Gingrich closed the OTA office, what do you feel? Maybe he did the right thing, you'd like to learn more why? Or Newt Gingrich was wrong? Or what?

drharby 7y ago
I was seven and playing donkey kong 2: diddys kongquest EDIT:More in spirit of the questions - i don't honestly care about yesteryear feelings, I care about the now. Politics is fluid. What can we do to reestablish the office and provide congress with informed decisions?
creaghpatr 7y ago
I'd be more interested in why Obama didn't re-form this office since it was so great, given the google/facebook anti-trust issues metastasized under his administration.
- ocdtrekkie 7y ago
  Barack Obama was so closely associated with Google, it isn't even remotely funny. The amount of interaction between Google and his administration is unprecedented; he could've been considered an employee. Suffice to say, he wasn't going to introduce a way to give the government objective understanding of issues around Google's monopoly.
  - creaghpatr 7y ago
    True, he hired his CTO straight out of Google. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megan_Smith https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megan_Smith
    - Operyl 7y ago
      At first I thought you had a typo, but I'll be damned, I didn't even realize that was a position in the Executive branch.. I have now found my afternoon research project for the day.
  - dekhn 7y ago
    I really had to chuckle when a coworker of mine called him "Barry" and then it turned out she had worked for him and that's what he asked his closest workers and friends to call him. Then I had to chuckle when several of my coworkers took leaves (fully supported by the leadership) to help out running the Obama infrastructure under Eric Schmidt. At times they got to fly between Chicago and SF on Eric's personal plane. Eventually several of those people ended up working for him (it's always weird when your ex-manager ends up leading a government department).
    - booboolayla 7y ago
      Let's not even mention Eric's trips to North Korea to set up gmail servers the gang used to communicate, out of reach of NSA and CIA.
  - toxican 7y ago
    My kneejerk reaction is that the Google of 2008, even 2012, isn't the same Google of 2019. Maybe that's political bias talking. All the same, not crazy about politicians and corporations being so cozy, regardless of affiliation.
- yummypaint 7y ago
  And here is the response we all expected
- dx87 7y ago
  His administration benefited a ton from Facebook. You can look up his old campaign manager's tweets about Facebook telling them that they were on their side, and that if anyone else had scraped as much info as they did, they would have been blocked.
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    Citation needed. One person's claim is not that whole story. https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/mar/22/meghan-mccain/comparing-facebook-data-use-obama-cambridge-analyt/ https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/mar...
    - derivagral 7y ago
      Among other google-able sources, https://twitter.com/cld276/status/975568208886484997 https://twitter.com/cld276/status/975568208886484997
    - cameronbrown 7y ago
      Obama did basically what Cambridge Analytica did. To this date I don't understand why the media reacted so differently to both situations. Edit: See link in response for an explanation. IMO I'm still uncomfortable with how they got data of friends, but that's about it. However, this does not refute the above point that Obama didn't heavily benefit from Facebook. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/feb/17/obama-digital-data-machine-facebook-election https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/feb/17/obama-digital-...
      - lonelappde 7y ago
        Because they were different. https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/mar/22/meghan-mccain/comparing-facebook-data-use-obama-cambridge-analyt/ https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/mar...
      - matchbok 7y ago
        Simply not true, at all.
- atonse 7y ago
  If you're thinking I'm going to disagree on that note, you're wrong. But the Obama administration also created the US Digital Service and 18F (after the healthcare.gov debacle), which are doing stellar work and continue to do so in the federal gov under the Trump Administration. Obama also did create the Office of Science and Technology Policy, so maybe this was the successor of what this office would've been. But they were more science focused. But that doesn't address my question about this particular office.
  - dekhn 7y ago
    Congress created OSTP in 1976 after Nixon disbanded the National Science Committee.
- ptah 7y ago
  sounds like it is a congress thing
- Symmetry 7y ago
  The executive branch already has technological experts to lean on. Obama was never particularly interested in giving up leverage the executive branch had over Congress, especially when his party wasn't in control there for most of his presidency.
mieseratte 7y ago
Reading the Wikipedia entry on it, the apparent charge to remove it was "unnecessary agency"[0] - that the scope of its responsibility was handled by other agencies, but doesn't elaborate what those other agencies are. Does anyone know what agencies are being alluded to? [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Technology_Assessment#Closure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Technology_Assessmen...
- eyo2019 7y ago
  If you read more closely, the book Fat City: How Washington Wastes Your Taxes was the one which stated that it was an "unnecessary agency" and the Regan admin liked the book. Newt Gingrich was the one who spearheaded the closure of the OTA.
- magashna 7y ago
  It's harder to accept telecom bribes when you have an official agency telling you how terrible they are.
mLuby 7y ago
For those of us who didn't know about this: >The Office of Technology Assessment's (1972-1995) purpose was to provide Congressional members and committees with objective and authoritative analysis of complex scientific and technical issues. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Technology_Assessment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Technology_Assessmen...
- chaosbutters 7y ago
  isn't this the purpose of FFRDCs like Mitre?
  - dboreham 7y ago
    Hmm...I thought Mitre was part of the military industrial complex?
    - edraferi 7y ago
      That’s a meaningless statement. > Federally funded research and development centers (FFRDCs) are public-private partnerships which conduct research for the United States Government. They are administered in accordance with U.S. Code of Federal Regulations, Title 48, Part 35, Section 35.017 by universities and corporations. There are currently 42 recognized FFRDCs that are sponsored by the U.S. government. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federally_funded_research_and_development_centers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federally_funded_research_and_... FFRDCs have a special legal ability to provide “neutral” input on technical matters. In theory Congress could hire Mitre or other FFRDCs to perform this service for them. That might take some tweaks to the law because FFRDC contracts seem to be aligned to specific executive agencies. Personally, I’m a big believer in Federal in-sourcing combined with civil service reform. Using contractors for public interest positions, even contractors with special designations like FFRDCs, clouds the issue with contract management. Of course, it’d be very difficult to design Civil Service reform properly and politically impossible to implement it, so creative contracting is probably the way to go for now.
garmaine 7y ago
Newt Gingrich != the Republican party. I'm sure I can cherry-pick some Democratic politician to get the point across if I cared, but I don't because your post is trolling.
- deleted 7y ago
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- deleted 7y ago
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- atonse 7y ago
  Errr he was the LEADER of the Republican Party, literally the Speaker of the House.
  - tylerl 7y ago
    So, like Harry Reid was for the Democrats? Yeah, we got baddies on both sides, especially in positions of authority.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  Newt Gingrich was the leader of the Republican Congress that closed the OTA, not a cherry-pick. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Technology_Assessment https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Technology_Assessm...
  - parsnips 7y ago
    who signed that budget?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
Cuuugi 7y ago
Tech based businesses didn't have half as much money/sway back then as they did now, so from a budgetary perspective i think it made sense at the time. Short sighted, but makes sense. My concern, is the massive amounts of failed promises Warren has made in efforts to shut down things like Robocalls, and for her to be auditioning for her next job before she's completed her current one bothers me.
wyldfire 7y ago
Not necessarily a republican techie but what if that office or other government offices satisfy a need but one that's bursty -- maybe we really only need them for six to nine months every seven or eight years? I'm not saying that's the case here but it seems like an interesting challenge to somehow leave an agency intact but be able to spin up and down like that. People in general prefer a lot more consistency in their careers.
- atonse 7y ago
  What I'd love to see is something like the National Academy of Sciences, where you have an organization that year-round advises Congress, and you are elected to it by your peers. So like the NAS has a lot of Nobel Prize winners, etc... this new "Academy" would have IEEE/ACM recipients, others that have a much longer view, pretty much what a lot of "distinguished engineers" or "fellows" do at private companies.
- kej 7y ago
  We've been doing exactly that every ten years for the census, so it's not exactly an unsolved problem.
- cowsandmilk 7y ago
  The federal government has plenty of bursty offices. The census bureau hires like crazy each decade for temporary jobs. There are government advisory positions that academics take for a summer or just go to DC for a week every four months. These things are not impossible.
- brodouevencode 7y ago
  I like the idea putting expiration dates on most government entities like this (at least the ones not spelled out by the Constitution). I'd even go as far as putting expiration dates on many laws, regulations to force politicians to reconsider their necessity.
  - CathedralBorrow 7y ago
    Well, the regular debt ceiling fiasco maybe shows the failure of putting that idea into practice?
s3r3nity 7y ago
Not sure what the reasoning was at the time, but I can provide some personal thoughts on the idea - so don't take it as representative of everyone who is center-right like myself. I don't trust a government entity to be "independent" or "non-partisan." The rule of thumb I use is "would I trust this government entity if my respective political party is only in control ~50% of the time?" Some other folks in the threads already mentioned this, but as one example: the Obama campaign was pretty close to the Facebooks / Googles of the world - meaning that there could be a scenario that this OTA office was staffed fully with ex-Googlers or the like, almost like a lobbying firm would do. On one hand, they're fully qualified and (probably) very knowledgeable; on the other hand, I wouldn't trust that the office would provide a fair assessment into regulating those tech companies. EDIT: grammar / more precise vocabulary
- maxerickson 7y ago
  I think you mean non-partisan. Government is inherently political.
  - oconnor663 7y ago
    People use the terms interchangeably. Also a lot of government jobs make the distinction between "career" and "political".
    - edraferi 7y ago
      I believe the distinction you’re looking for is Civil Service vs Appointed positions. The Civil Service is composed of employees who are hired and managed competitively (to the extent allowable by the unions and massive red tape...). Appointed positions are executive roles filled by the whim of the president, or the whim of someone the president delegates to. The most powerful appointed positions require Senate confirmation.
- atonse 7y ago
  As a DC Area resident for 25+ years, I have met many federal government employees, some in professional settings, and many in casual settings. They remind me of Journalists. Most journalists I've met are not centrists in their personal lives. But in their professional lives, they try (they're not perfect, they are human) to stay impartial, but some of your bias will definitely leak into things. But most federal agencies are simply too large and bureaucratic for individuals to push their own political agendas. (Not talking about the leadership that's appointed by each administration, but career employees). And it's been my informal experience that their hands are too often (rightly) tied by the laws and regulations of the day, in exactly what they can do. So this idea of non-partisan people truly being partisan is often true at an individual level, but generally false at an agency level. And they do take the non-partisan side of their jobs very seriously.
throwaway190927 7y ago
Throwaway for obvious reasons. This is not an appropriate role of government and I'm glad Gingrich closed it down. The government is not "us" as former president Obama and many HN readers believe. It is a entity separate and apart from the people it claims to represent and therefore its size and role should be extremely limited. Any representation it claims to provide can be easily proven wrong under scrutiny, if only the educated elite would bother to do so.
drharby 7y ago
I was seven and playing donkey kong 2: diddys kongquest EDIT:More in spirit of the questions - i don't honestly care about yesteryear feelings, I care about the now. Politics is fluid. What can we do to reestablish the office and provide congress with informed decisions? Repasted bc it seems my comment was quietly silenced with zero feedback and I'm a rebel
brodouevencode 7y ago
Half of Newt's career was built on minimizing government (or at least that's the claim). So, it fits the pattern. As far as how I feel about it, my political views are closer to Ron Swanson than Leslie Knope, so I'm not too unhappy about it.
irrational 7y ago
The smallest government possible without collapsing into anarchy is preferable. So any government agency getting the axe is good news.
salawat 7y ago
Personally, I feel Gingrich was an idiot. From my short stint in Government service (the Executive Branch), most employees are a bit too busy trying to do what they can with what they've got to really play the partisanship game. There is also a heavy inertia constituted by the fact that making the decision isn't your responsibility. Collating information is to make the decision well informed is. When I learned the OTA existed and was dismantled a few years ago, I was extremely upset. I'd sign up to act as a fact finder/researcher for policy makers in an instant. Lobbyists cannot be trusted to have the safeguarding of the public's liberty at heart, whereas a Legislative Research Division has one goal. Collect and parse information to impartially feed the policy making process. When I heard the justification for getting rid of it (I.e. always being at odds with lobbyists) I had to unplug for a couple days to try to figure out how my model of the world could be so inaccurate.
tathougies 7y ago
Why does the government need another office to provide this commentary? The onus is on those seeking change to explain why its necessary not on those for the status quo. Government 'independent' offices are not immune from political spin. Congressional committees are ultimately the ones tasked with making policy and they have authlrity to call whomever they want to testify. If the OTA wouldn't say what they wanted to hear, they'd just call someone else. The United states does not suffer from a dearth of scientists. We should be able to get everything we need from the OTA via private commissions and private subpoenas.
- SamBam 7y ago
  > The onus is on those seeking change to explain why its necessary not on those for the status quo. The issue is that those who listen to the arguments and make the decision may not know enough to counter the arguments. Any tech company can come up with some argument to explain why a given change is necessary.
  - tathougies 7y ago
    > The issue is that those who listen to the arguments and make the decision may not know enough to counter the arguments. Sure. Congresspeople are neither scientists nor technologists. I get that. Congresspeople do have the power to spend government funds though, and they are more than capable of commissioning an outside research agency with expertise in the given area to provide commentary. In fact, this is better than a government agency with only 140 employees. First of all, not all 140 of those employees are researchers. Assume -- generously -- that 120 are. That is still only 120 researchers. The idea that 120 people can be enough to exhaustively provide expertise on all possible ranges of technology and science, etc, is ridiculous. 120 people would barely be able to offer expertise on all the various computer science topics, much less physics, climate science, etc. Instead of pretending that this limited office could actually be an expert in everything, it's much better to be realistic, and just pay someone else to prepare a study, and testify, like an expert witness would. If you are worried about bias, make it so that commissions have to hire two agencies -- it's probably still cheaper than funding a government bureaucracy and giving them all pensions anyway.
agensaequivocum 7y ago
I was a very young child in the 90s and I think this is the first I've heard of this incident so I don't have a strong opinion. I will say, in general, I don't like executive agencies and would not have a problem with most of them being abolished.
29_29 7y ago
Libertarian here. How did I feel? Step out of the box, and imagine for a second that business and profit are not inherently evil. This is what we are told, every day by people like Warren. I believe profit is a reward for providing something people want for a lower price - and absolutely necessary to be in business. Profit is a function of efficiency. The question rests in the in the notion that Government, (not motivated by the ability to make something people want for a lower price) will be able to do a better job than the free market in making tech policy decisions. It seems silly that a small team of government hired employees would know better than tens of thousands of Google, Amazon or Facebook experts. Libertarians could view this small group of government employees as corrupt. Using their personal politics and authoritarian power to pick winners and losers - rather than let the free people pick real winners and losers. So it depends on your perspective. Do you personally believe the Government can do a better job than the people?
- lemmsjid 7y ago
  I don’t see that as a one or the other decision. I think of it as a continuum, where decision making on either side is grounded in knowledge of history. Should the government decide if Nike or Addidas make better shoes? No, let the market do that. But if one company makes cheaper and better shoes by offloading toxic waste into aquifers that feed large cities, the market is not good at weeding that out until the damage has been done. Enter regulations created in and of the public interest.
- CathedralBorrow 7y ago
  That certainly depends on the task and what 'better job' means. For example, private enterprise can certainly make a lot of money providing health care but I'd be very disappointed if my country switched to privatized health care. I personally believe that the Government can do, and does, a better job than "the people" in providing me with health care.
  - 29_29 7y ago
    The Libertarian perspective on healthcare is that it is the most regulated portion of the economy, so if other areas of the economy become as regulated, their prices would go up. We see this in Bay Area housing markets.
vxNsr 7y ago
I'm troubled by it, but I'm troubled by a lot of things both parties have done, happens to be I agree with most of the objectives of the republican party over the objectives and platform of the democrats. So until there is one party that does everything I like and nothing I don't like I'm gonna continue to vote my conscious on each ballot. I don't think I've ever voted a straight ticket before.
axaxs 7y ago
Because the government is, or becomes, terrible at everything. All it takes is one super republican or democrat or socialist in leadership to start padding the office with their own people. Add to that, a lot of government jobs are stable, regardless of how awful you are(DMV, anyone?). I just don't trust it to keep fresh, and not fill with aging folks who haven't paid attention in years. I'd probably be more OK with the idea if there were mandatory term limits, like the USDS, and the vetting process had oversight from a committee of congress.
Consultant32452 7y ago
The reason why companies like Google care to do things like lobby is that those companies get the majority of their power from the government, so of course they want to petition the government for more of it. It doesn't make sense to get into an arms race in this way. Instead, let's eviscerate copyright and patent protections, and let's take a wack at the corporate veil too. That will chop companies like Google down to size and make their lobbying irrelevant and/or useless while simultaneously weakening their power to control the rest of us.
tolmasky 7y ago
I'm not a "Republican Techie" (I would classify myself as "left"-leaning), and I am suspicious of this because of that. For me, I look at analogous examples where we have tried to build technical expertise in the government. One such reference point is the US Patent Office. Although they don't have a "small" workforce in absolute terms, they are overwhelmed with the number and kind of filings they get. You basically need to remain an expert in the field in order to do that job well, but it is very hard to remain an expert in the field if you are working at the USPTO instead of the field. It is also difficult to keep people in this position where if they are particularly creative or knowledgable they could alternatively be doing exciting meaningful work in the field. The result is ultimately what many of us complain about: nonsense patents getting through, patent trolls pushing people around, and a new vested interest in exploiting the patent office. Importantly, this is not to say that an ideal patent office wouldn't be a meaningful job: I think many of us here wish that we had "the best" working there to prevent these sorts of lapses (and potentially allow "good patents" -- not meaning to get into a discussion as to the validity of software patents in general, just saying that the hypothetical version of the patent office diverges significantly from the one we actually have). I have a hard time believing this organization wouldn't work similarly. Would they coincidentally have a an expert on lattice encryption when quantum computers become a realistic threat to current schemes? Would the general leanings of career-members of the OTA (who thus have a somewhat "frozen" view of technology from whenever they started) create the opportunity to form some sort of regulatory capture? I don't know. Ultimately the solution is "if we had a group that really cared about the public good, then...". My point is that I'd like for something like the OTA to be good, but I think practically speaking it won't have the effects we think it will. I am much more in favor of trying to create an adversarial counter-balance (or ideally multiple adversarial counter-balances). If I could somehow snap my fingers and grant the equivalent budget that this OTA would have to the EFF for example, I'd take that immediately. This is because things like this become issues maybe in one election, but ultimately get drowned out for a much more popular issue later. The forming of some government agency to "fix this" makes people feel like it is thus "fixed", instead of realizing that it is a constant battle we need to be actively engaged in -- that's what makes me feel like supporting groups like the EFF is more important and potentially more effective than creating some organization that could easily just be disbanded just like it was in the 90s and completely undone.
nonford150 7y ago
Newt's rallying cry was always to reduce the size of government. The only way to do so was lean on the private sector, as things still needed to be done. While the hope is those private contractors will just follow the contract and not let any bias seep in, it's inevitable. For the time, and to his agenda, closing the OTA seems like the correct move (for him and the party). Not sure if it was the best move overall, but, it did follow the mood and spirit of the Republicans at that time. I'm no Warren fan (center/right so there is no one I actually support in 2020 right now - and I don't expect there will be) but it seems to me to ensure the people regain control of our government we (the American populace) must place less reliance on the private sector for such specialized tasks. The private sector use should be more towards the mundane tasks of government. Such specialized areas like tech have to separated from the firms who would benefit from whatever actions and effects they make upon our government.
nostrademons 7y ago
This is a good idea, but terms in the OTA should be time-limited so that professionals staffing it need to get jobs (or start companies) in the private sector again after 4-5 years. Tech moves quickly, and technical knowledge becomes stale in about that time period. The last thing we need is a government bureaucracy of career civil servants that mandates best practices that were current 40 years ago.
esmi 7y ago
It’s definitely good that people are thinking about this but like with many thing, the devil is in the details. I think there are a lot of parallels to banking & financing and the regulation and oversight of those industries. Definitely it’s good to do something rather than nothing, and many good things happen because of oversight etc. But just like in banking, don’t expect this to be a panacea and things are going to happen very slowly.

by atonse 7y ago

drharby 7y ago

I was seven and playing donkey kong 2: diddys kongquest EDIT:More in spirit of the questions - i don't honestly care about yesteryear feelings, I care about the now. Politics is fluid. What can we do to reestablish the office and provide congress with informed decisions?

creaghpatr 7y ago

I'd be more interested in why Obama didn't re-form this office since it was so great, given the google/facebook anti-trust issues metastasized under his administration.

ocdtrekkie 7y ago
Barack Obama was so closely associated with Google, it isn't even remotely funny. The amount of interaction between Google and his administration is unprecedented; he could've been considered an employee. Suffice to say, he wasn't going to introduce a way to give the government objective understanding of issues around Google's monopoly.
- creaghpatr 7y ago
  True, he hired his CTO straight out of Google. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megan_Smith https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megan_Smith
  - Operyl 7y ago
    At first I thought you had a typo, but I'll be damned, I didn't even realize that was a position in the Executive branch.. I have now found my afternoon research project for the day.
- dekhn 7y ago
  I really had to chuckle when a coworker of mine called him "Barry" and then it turned out she had worked for him and that's what he asked his closest workers and friends to call him. Then I had to chuckle when several of my coworkers took leaves (fully supported by the leadership) to help out running the Obama infrastructure under Eric Schmidt. At times they got to fly between Chicago and SF on Eric's personal plane. Eventually several of those people ended up working for him (it's always weird when your ex-manager ends up leading a government department).
  - booboolayla 7y ago
    Let's not even mention Eric's trips to North Korea to set up gmail servers the gang used to communicate, out of reach of NSA and CIA.
- toxican 7y ago
  My kneejerk reaction is that the Google of 2008, even 2012, isn't the same Google of 2019. Maybe that's political bias talking. All the same, not crazy about politicians and corporations being so cozy, regardless of affiliation.
yummypaint 7y ago
And here is the response we all expected
dx87 7y ago
His administration benefited a ton from Facebook. You can look up his old campaign manager's tweets about Facebook telling them that they were on their side, and that if anyone else had scraped as much info as they did, they would have been blocked.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  Citation needed. One person's claim is not that whole story. https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/mar/22/meghan-mccain/comparing-facebook-data-use-obama-cambridge-analyt/ https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/mar...
  - derivagral 7y ago
    Among other google-able sources, https://twitter.com/cld276/status/975568208886484997 https://twitter.com/cld276/status/975568208886484997
  - cameronbrown 7y ago
    Obama did basically what Cambridge Analytica did. To this date I don't understand why the media reacted so differently to both situations. Edit: See link in response for an explanation. IMO I'm still uncomfortable with how they got data of friends, but that's about it. However, this does not refute the above point that Obama didn't heavily benefit from Facebook. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/feb/17/obama-digital-data-machine-facebook-election https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/feb/17/obama-digital-...
    - lonelappde 7y ago
      Because they were different. https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/mar/22/meghan-mccain/comparing-facebook-data-use-obama-cambridge-analyt/ https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/mar...
    - matchbok 7y ago
      Simply not true, at all.
atonse 7y ago
If you're thinking I'm going to disagree on that note, you're wrong. But the Obama administration also created the US Digital Service and 18F (after the healthcare.gov debacle), which are doing stellar work and continue to do so in the federal gov under the Trump Administration. Obama also did create the Office of Science and Technology Policy, so maybe this was the successor of what this office would've been. But they were more science focused. But that doesn't address my question about this particular office.
- dekhn 7y ago
  Congress created OSTP in 1976 after Nixon disbanded the National Science Committee.
ptah 7y ago
sounds like it is a congress thing
Symmetry 7y ago
The executive branch already has technological experts to lean on. Obama was never particularly interested in giving up leverage the executive branch had over Congress, especially when his party wasn't in control there for most of his presidency.

mieseratte 7y ago

Reading the Wikipedia entry on it, the apparent charge to remove it was "unnecessary agency"[0] - that the scope of its responsibility was handled by other agencies, but doesn't elaborate what those other agencies are. Does anyone know what agencies are being alluded to? [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Technology_Assessment#Closure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Technology_Assessmen...

eyo2019 7y ago
If you read more closely, the book Fat City: How Washington Wastes Your Taxes was the one which stated that it was an "unnecessary agency" and the Regan admin liked the book. Newt Gingrich was the one who spearheaded the closure of the OTA.
magashna 7y ago
It's harder to accept telecom bribes when you have an official agency telling you how terrible they are.

mLuby 7y ago

For those of us who didn't know about this: >The Office of Technology Assessment's (1972-1995) purpose was to provide Congressional members and committees with objective and authoritative analysis of complex scientific and technical issues. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Technology_Assessment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Technology_Assessmen...

chaosbutters 7y ago
isn't this the purpose of FFRDCs like Mitre?
- dboreham 7y ago
  Hmm...I thought Mitre was part of the military industrial complex?
  - edraferi 7y ago
    That’s a meaningless statement. > Federally funded research and development centers (FFRDCs) are public-private partnerships which conduct research for the United States Government. They are administered in accordance with U.S. Code of Federal Regulations, Title 48, Part 35, Section 35.017 by universities and corporations. There are currently 42 recognized FFRDCs that are sponsored by the U.S. government. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federally_funded_research_and_development_centers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federally_funded_research_and_... FFRDCs have a special legal ability to provide “neutral” input on technical matters. In theory Congress could hire Mitre or other FFRDCs to perform this service for them. That might take some tweaks to the law because FFRDC contracts seem to be aligned to specific executive agencies. Personally, I’m a big believer in Federal in-sourcing combined with civil service reform. Using contractors for public interest positions, even contractors with special designations like FFRDCs, clouds the issue with contract management. Of course, it’d be very difficult to design Civil Service reform properly and politically impossible to implement it, so creative contracting is probably the way to go for now.

garmaine 7y ago

Newt Gingrich != the Republican party. I'm sure I can cherry-pick some Democratic politician to get the point across if I cared, but I don't because your post is trolling.

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atonse 7y ago
Errr he was the LEADER of the Republican Party, literally the Speaker of the House.
- tylerl 7y ago
  So, like Harry Reid was for the Democrats? Yeah, we got baddies on both sides, especially in positions of authority.
lonelappde 7y ago
Newt Gingrich was the leader of the Republican Congress that closed the OTA, not a cherry-pick. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Technology_Assessment https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Technology_Assessm...
- parsnips 7y ago
  who signed that budget?
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Cuuugi 7y ago

Tech based businesses didn't have half as much money/sway back then as they did now, so from a budgetary perspective i think it made sense at the time. Short sighted, but makes sense. My concern, is the massive amounts of failed promises Warren has made in efforts to shut down things like Robocalls, and for her to be auditioning for her next job before she's completed her current one bothers me.

wyldfire 7y ago

Not necessarily a republican techie but what if that office or other government offices satisfy a need but one that's bursty -- maybe we really only need them for six to nine months every seven or eight years? I'm not saying that's the case here but it seems like an interesting challenge to somehow leave an agency intact but be able to spin up and down like that. People in general prefer a lot more consistency in their careers.

atonse 7y ago
What I'd love to see is something like the National Academy of Sciences, where you have an organization that year-round advises Congress, and you are elected to it by your peers. So like the NAS has a lot of Nobel Prize winners, etc... this new "Academy" would have IEEE/ACM recipients, others that have a much longer view, pretty much what a lot of "distinguished engineers" or "fellows" do at private companies.
kej 7y ago
We've been doing exactly that every ten years for the census, so it's not exactly an unsolved problem.
cowsandmilk 7y ago
The federal government has plenty of bursty offices. The census bureau hires like crazy each decade for temporary jobs. There are government advisory positions that academics take for a summer or just go to DC for a week every four months. These things are not impossible.
brodouevencode 7y ago
I like the idea putting expiration dates on most government entities like this (at least the ones not spelled out by the Constitution). I'd even go as far as putting expiration dates on many laws, regulations to force politicians to reconsider their necessity.
- CathedralBorrow 7y ago
  Well, the regular debt ceiling fiasco maybe shows the failure of putting that idea into practice?

s3r3nity 7y ago

Not sure what the reasoning was at the time, but I can provide some personal thoughts on the idea - so don't take it as representative of everyone who is center-right like myself. I don't trust a government entity to be "independent" or "non-partisan." The rule of thumb I use is "would I trust this government entity if my respective political party is only in control ~50% of the time?" Some other folks in the threads already mentioned this, but as one example: the Obama campaign was pretty close to the Facebooks / Googles of the world - meaning that there could be a scenario that this OTA office was staffed fully with ex-Googlers or the like, almost like a lobbying firm would do. On one hand, they're fully qualified and (probably) very knowledgeable; on the other hand, I wouldn't trust that the office would provide a fair assessment into regulating those tech companies. EDIT: grammar / more precise vocabulary

maxerickson 7y ago
I think you mean non-partisan. Government is inherently political.
- oconnor663 7y ago
  People use the terms interchangeably. Also a lot of government jobs make the distinction between "career" and "political".
  - edraferi 7y ago
    I believe the distinction you’re looking for is Civil Service vs Appointed positions. The Civil Service is composed of employees who are hired and managed competitively (to the extent allowable by the unions and massive red tape...). Appointed positions are executive roles filled by the whim of the president, or the whim of someone the president delegates to. The most powerful appointed positions require Senate confirmation.
atonse 7y ago
As a DC Area resident for 25+ years, I have met many federal government employees, some in professional settings, and many in casual settings. They remind me of Journalists. Most journalists I've met are not centrists in their personal lives. But in their professional lives, they try (they're not perfect, they are human) to stay impartial, but some of your bias will definitely leak into things. But most federal agencies are simply too large and bureaucratic for individuals to push their own political agendas. (Not talking about the leadership that's appointed by each administration, but career employees). And it's been my informal experience that their hands are too often (rightly) tied by the laws and regulations of the day, in exactly what they can do. So this idea of non-partisan people truly being partisan is often true at an individual level, but generally false at an agency level. And they do take the non-partisan side of their jobs very seriously.

throwaway190927 7y ago

Throwaway for obvious reasons. This is not an appropriate role of government and I'm glad Gingrich closed it down. The government is not "us" as former president Obama and many HN readers believe. It is a entity separate and apart from the people it claims to represent and therefore its size and role should be extremely limited. Any representation it claims to provide can be easily proven wrong under scrutiny, if only the educated elite would bother to do so.

drharby 7y ago

brodouevencode 7y ago

Half of Newt's career was built on minimizing government (or at least that's the claim). So, it fits the pattern. As far as how I feel about it, my political views are closer to Ron Swanson than Leslie Knope, so I'm not too unhappy about it.

irrational 7y ago

The smallest government possible without collapsing into anarchy is preferable. So any government agency getting the axe is good news.

salawat 7y ago

Personally, I feel Gingrich was an idiot. From my short stint in Government service (the Executive Branch), most employees are a bit too busy trying to do what they can with what they've got to really play the partisanship game. There is also a heavy inertia constituted by the fact that making the decision isn't your responsibility. Collating information is to make the decision well informed is. When I learned the OTA existed and was dismantled a few years ago, I was extremely upset. I'd sign up to act as a fact finder/researcher for policy makers in an instant. Lobbyists cannot be trusted to have the safeguarding of the public's liberty at heart, whereas a Legislative Research Division has one goal. Collect and parse information to impartially feed the policy making process. When I heard the justification for getting rid of it (I.e. always being at odds with lobbyists) I had to unplug for a couple days to try to figure out how my model of the world could be so inaccurate.

tathougies 7y ago

Why does the government need another office to provide this commentary? The onus is on those seeking change to explain why its necessary not on those for the status quo. Government 'independent' offices are not immune from political spin. Congressional committees are ultimately the ones tasked with making policy and they have authlrity to call whomever they want to testify. If the OTA wouldn't say what they wanted to hear, they'd just call someone else. The United states does not suffer from a dearth of scientists. We should be able to get everything we need from the OTA via private commissions and private subpoenas.

SamBam 7y ago
> The onus is on those seeking change to explain why its necessary not on those for the status quo. The issue is that those who listen to the arguments and make the decision may not know enough to counter the arguments. Any tech company can come up with some argument to explain why a given change is necessary.
- tathougies 7y ago
  > The issue is that those who listen to the arguments and make the decision may not know enough to counter the arguments. Sure. Congresspeople are neither scientists nor technologists. I get that. Congresspeople do have the power to spend government funds though, and they are more than capable of commissioning an outside research agency with expertise in the given area to provide commentary. In fact, this is better than a government agency with only 140 employees. First of all, not all 140 of those employees are researchers. Assume -- generously -- that 120 are. That is still only 120 researchers. The idea that 120 people can be enough to exhaustively provide expertise on all possible ranges of technology and science, etc, is ridiculous. 120 people would barely be able to offer expertise on all the various computer science topics, much less physics, climate science, etc. Instead of pretending that this limited office could actually be an expert in everything, it's much better to be realistic, and just pay someone else to prepare a study, and testify, like an expert witness would. If you are worried about bias, make it so that commissions have to hire two agencies -- it's probably still cheaper than funding a government bureaucracy and giving them all pensions anyway.

agensaequivocum 7y ago

I was a very young child in the 90s and I think this is the first I've heard of this incident so I don't have a strong opinion. I will say, in general, I don't like executive agencies and would not have a problem with most of them being abolished.

29_29 7y ago

Libertarian here. How did I feel? Step out of the box, and imagine for a second that business and profit are not inherently evil. This is what we are told, every day by people like Warren. I believe profit is a reward for providing something people want for a lower price - and absolutely necessary to be in business. Profit is a function of efficiency. The question rests in the in the notion that Government, (not motivated by the ability to make something people want for a lower price) will be able to do a better job than the free market in making tech policy decisions. It seems silly that a small team of government hired employees would know better than tens of thousands of Google, Amazon or Facebook experts. Libertarians could view this small group of government employees as corrupt. Using their personal politics and authoritarian power to pick winners and losers - rather than let the free people pick real winners and losers. So it depends on your perspective. Do you personally believe the Government can do a better job than the people?

lemmsjid 7y ago
I don’t see that as a one or the other decision. I think of it as a continuum, where decision making on either side is grounded in knowledge of history. Should the government decide if Nike or Addidas make better shoes? No, let the market do that. But if one company makes cheaper and better shoes by offloading toxic waste into aquifers that feed large cities, the market is not good at weeding that out until the damage has been done. Enter regulations created in and of the public interest.
CathedralBorrow 7y ago
That certainly depends on the task and what 'better job' means. For example, private enterprise can certainly make a lot of money providing health care but I'd be very disappointed if my country switched to privatized health care. I personally believe that the Government can do, and does, a better job than "the people" in providing me with health care.
- 29_29 7y ago
  The Libertarian perspective on healthcare is that it is the most regulated portion of the economy, so if other areas of the economy become as regulated, their prices would go up. We see this in Bay Area housing markets.

vxNsr 7y ago

I'm troubled by it, but I'm troubled by a lot of things both parties have done, happens to be I agree with most of the objectives of the republican party over the objectives and platform of the democrats. So until there is one party that does everything I like and nothing I don't like I'm gonna continue to vote my conscious on each ballot. I don't think I've ever voted a straight ticket before.

axaxs 7y ago

Because the government is, or becomes, terrible at everything. All it takes is one super republican or democrat or socialist in leadership to start padding the office with their own people. Add to that, a lot of government jobs are stable, regardless of how awful you are(DMV, anyone?). I just don't trust it to keep fresh, and not fill with aging folks who haven't paid attention in years. I'd probably be more OK with the idea if there were mandatory term limits, like the USDS, and the vetting process had oversight from a committee of congress.

Consultant32452 7y ago

The reason why companies like Google care to do things like lobby is that those companies get the majority of their power from the government, so of course they want to petition the government for more of it. It doesn't make sense to get into an arms race in this way. Instead, let's eviscerate copyright and patent protections, and let's take a wack at the corporate veil too. That will chop companies like Google down to size and make their lobbying irrelevant and/or useless while simultaneously weakening their power to control the rest of us.

tolmasky 7y ago

I'm not a "Republican Techie" (I would classify myself as "left"-leaning), and I am suspicious of this because of that. For me, I look at analogous examples where we have tried to build technical expertise in the government. One such reference point is the US Patent Office. Although they don't have a "small" workforce in absolute terms, they are overwhelmed with the number and kind of filings they get. You basically need to remain an expert in the field in order to do that job well, but it is very hard to remain an expert in the field if you are working at the USPTO instead of the field. It is also difficult to keep people in this position where if they are particularly creative or knowledgable they could alternatively be doing exciting meaningful work in the field. The result is ultimately what many of us complain about: nonsense patents getting through, patent trolls pushing people around, and a new vested interest in exploiting the patent office. Importantly, this is not to say that an ideal patent office wouldn't be a meaningful job: I think many of us here wish that we had "the best" working there to prevent these sorts of lapses (and potentially allow "good patents" -- not meaning to get into a discussion as to the validity of software patents in general, just saying that the hypothetical version of the patent office diverges significantly from the one we actually have). I have a hard time believing this organization wouldn't work similarly. Would they coincidentally have a an expert on lattice encryption when quantum computers become a realistic threat to current schemes? Would the general leanings of career-members of the OTA (who thus have a somewhat "frozen" view of technology from whenever they started) create the opportunity to form some sort of regulatory capture? I don't know. Ultimately the solution is "if we had a group that really cared about the public good, then...". My point is that I'd like for something like the OTA to be good, but I think practically speaking it won't have the effects we think it will. I am much more in favor of trying to create an adversarial counter-balance (or ideally multiple adversarial counter-balances). If I could somehow snap my fingers and grant the equivalent budget that this OTA would have to the EFF for example, I'd take that immediately. This is because things like this become issues maybe in one election, but ultimately get drowned out for a much more popular issue later. The forming of some government agency to "fix this" makes people feel like it is thus "fixed", instead of realizing that it is a constant battle we need to be actively engaged in -- that's what makes me feel like supporting groups like the EFF is more important and potentially more effective than creating some organization that could easily just be disbanded just like it was in the 90s and completely undone.

nonford150 7y ago

Newt's rallying cry was always to reduce the size of government. The only way to do so was lean on the private sector, as things still needed to be done. While the hope is those private contractors will just follow the contract and not let any bias seep in, it's inevitable. For the time, and to his agenda, closing the OTA seems like the correct move (for him and the party). Not sure if it was the best move overall, but, it did follow the mood and spirit of the Republicans at that time. I'm no Warren fan (center/right so there is no one I actually support in 2020 right now - and I don't expect there will be) but it seems to me to ensure the people regain control of our government we (the American populace) must place less reliance on the private sector for such specialized tasks. The private sector use should be more towards the mundane tasks of government. Such specialized areas like tech have to separated from the firms who would benefit from whatever actions and effects they make upon our government.

nostrademons 7y ago

This is a good idea, but terms in the OTA should be time-limited so that professionals staffing it need to get jobs (or start companies) in the private sector again after 4-5 years. Tech moves quickly, and technical knowledge becomes stale in about that time period. The last thing we need is a government bureaucracy of career civil servants that mandates best practices that were current 40 years ago.

esmi 7y ago

It’s definitely good that people are thinking about this but like with many thing, the devil is in the details. I think there are a lot of parallels to banking & financing and the regulation and oversight of those industries. Definitely it’s good to do something rather than nothing, and many good things happen because of oversight etc. But just like in banking, don’t expect this to be a panacea and things are going to happen very slowly.