Clueless Congress...

On Democrats’ wish list: Tech help for a clueless Congress

Advocates say reviving the Office of Technology Assessment would be one way to help Congress get a grip on the complex topics it is trying to tackle.

By NANCY SCOLA

Lawmakers' cluelessness at regulating the powerful yet controversy-plagued technology industry is fueling a new push by Democrats to bring back the squad of congressional tech advisers that Newt Gingrich abolished in the 1990s.

Advocates say reviving the Office of Technology Assessment would be one way to help Congress get a grip on the complex topics it is trying to tackle, ranging from digital privacy, encryption and quantum computing to online election interference and allegations of social media political bias. In the past year, lawmakers have appeared perplexed by the basics of modern technology — as shown by their struggles to piece together coherent questions during hearings with the CEOs of Facebook, Twitter and Google.

“I use your apparatus often,” Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) told Google CEO Sundar Pichai at a hearing this month, referring to the company’s search engine. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), who has been in office since 1976, offered the most rudimentary of questions to Facebook CEO Zuckerberg in April: How does his multibillion dollar company make money? (“Senator, we run ads,” Zuckerberg said, failing to suppress a grin.)

The displays of tech illiteracy drew a lot of mockery at the time. But the months since then have brought new revelations about Facebook’s business practices, including its sharing of users’ data with other tech companies, as well as questions on issues such as the way Google’s search algorithms give more or less prominence to certain kinds of content.

“Congress can’t afford to be stupid about technology,” said Daniel Schuman, policy director at Demand Progress, a progressive advocacy group. “The legislation and oversight Congress does on technology, which is a huge part of our economy, affects everything from privacy to national security. And if Congress is going to regulate in the space, it needs to know what it’s doing.”

The OTA aimed to fill that gap from 1972 to 1995, equipping legislators with reports and research on cutting-edge topics. But then-Speaker Newt Gingrich defunded it after the Republicans took over Congress during the Clinton era, and it's been mothballed ever since.

Presumed speaker-in-waiting Nancy Pelosi and other congressional Democrats called for a rebooted OTA in August as part of the package of policy proposals they labeled “A Better Deal.” Her expected second-in-command, Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), declared in a government reform speech in September that "we ought to re-establish the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment."

Abolishing the office in 1995 was partly an effort to show Americans that Congress could tighten its own belt, and partly fueled by Republican disdain for the OTA, which had dissed Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” missile defense program. And Gingrich maintains that Republicans made the right call.

“There are many world class scientists willing to give Congress advice,” Gingrich told POLITICO by email. “We found that OTA had become bureaucratic and politicized, so much of its advice was ideological rather than scientific.”

Still, the push to restore the office has gained traction among both mainstream GOP lawmakers and the party's libertarian wing. Outgoing House Energy and Commerce Chairman Greg Walden (R-Ore.) and Justin Amash (R-Mich.), chairman of the House Liberty Caucus, are among the Republicans who voted this summer to bring back the office.

Again and again, members of Congress have displayed an apparent tech ignorance combined with awkward questions that are both difficult for executives to answer with any degree of precision and easy for them to dodge.

In one exchange this spring, Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) asked Zuckerberg about emails sent through WhatsApp, a Facebook product that does not use emails. (Schatz later tweeted that his bungled question was "embarrassing" and that his staff made fun of him for it — “and I deserve it.”)

In another back and forth in December, Rep. Ted Poe (R-Texas) demanded that Pichai declare definitively whether Google was tracking his movements through his iPhone — an answer that would depend on what Google applications Poe had running on his Apple-made device. When Pichai protested that he'd need to know the particulars of the congressman's phone, Poe thundered, “You make $100 million a year. You should be able to answer that question.” That exchange prompted Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who represents part of Silicon Valley, to tweet, "Can a 5th grader from Poe’s district please give Poe a tutorial on what an app is?”

Khanna told POLITICO that bringing back the Office of Technology Assessment would help avoid that sort of “embarrassment.”

“It’s one of the biggest things we could do. If we could have academics or people from industry with real technical competency, it would be a big asset for Congress,” he said. He added, “The world is moving so fast, and it’s almost like Congress is from a different age, a different era.”

Congress's lack of facility with tech has long been the subject of derision. The late Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) was broadly mocked for referring to the internet in 2006 as "a series of tubes."

But the stakes have gotten much higher since then given the scale of the U.S. tech industry today and the deep reach of its tendrils into America's economic, political and social life.

Advocates for restoring the office say one major obstacle over the years has been Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.). The 15-term congressman long complained that OTA produced its reports at too slow a pace to be useful.

Many also suspected that Rohrabacher, a former aide to Reagan, remained angry that in the 1980s the office had criticized the Star Wars initiative meant to counter the Soviet Union. OTA’s research on the program was unusually blunt, declaring in one report that its objectives were “impossible to achieve.”

Rohrabacher, however, won't be returning to Congress in January, having lost his bid for re-election. His office didn't return a request for comment.

Opponents of bringing back the OTA say Congress gets the technical advice it needs from other legislative support agencies such as the Government Accountability Office and the Congressional Research Service. They say a revived OTA would be a waste of the legislative branch's limited funds.

But fans of the tech-squad concept say it could give members of Congress essential in-house guidance on not just on the nuts-and-bolts of search engines and social media, but on the fundamentals of topics like artificial intelligence, quantum computing and gene manipulation that politicians are increasingly being asked to take on. Given how American democracy works — where just about anyone can run for Congress — it makes sense to pair them with a little help when it comes to grasping tech’s nuances, these people say.

“We don’t have a class of wise mandarins to rule us. Congress is a slice of America, and there’s no reason to suppose they would have expertise” in tech, said Kevin Kosar of the right-of-center policy research group R Street Institute. “That’s why you need a corps of nerds to advise Congress on its options.”

Only a handful of lawmakers have backgrounds in technology, including Sen.-elect Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.), a former computer programmer, and Will Hurd (R-Tex.), a one-time cybersecurity adviser in the private sector. Otherwise, members of Congress and their staff depend on either lobbyists or federal agencies to help them navigate tech topics, Kosar said, adding that Congress needs advice from people who "don’t have skin in the game.”

To survive, a new OTA would need to navigate the political battles that contributed to the downfall of its predecessor. Advocates say the office could take a lesson from agencies like GAO and CRS, which generally manage to stay above the fray.

Backers of the office express hope it can get through both houses of the divided Congress next year, perhaps as part of a broader appropriations package.

Rush Holt, a physicist who served in the House from 1999 to 2015, said it's time to reverse this legacy of the Gingrich era.

“There are two planks of the Contract with America that still survive: Members of Congress don’t receive twice-a-day buckets of ice to mix their bourbon and branch water, and the Office of Technology Assessment is unfunded,“ said Holt, a New Jersey Democrat.

"Just the presence of these people on the Hill — hundreds of professional-level scientists and engineers, working there every day — elevated the level of debate," he said. "The real problem now is members of Congress don't know what they're missing."