[House Hearing, 116 Congress] [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office] EXPERTS NEEDED: OPTIONS FOR IMPROVED SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY ADVICE FOR CONGRESS ======================================================================= HEARING BEFORE THE COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, SPACE, AND TECHNOLOGY HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES ONE HUNDRED SIXTEENTH CONGRESS FIRST SESSION __________ DECEMBER 5, 2019 __________ Serial No. 116-60 __________ Printed for the use of the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology [GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT] Available via the World Wide Web: http://science.house.gov ______ U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE 38-483 PDF WASHINGTON : 2020 COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, SPACE, AND TECHNOLOGY HON. EDDIE BERNICE JOHNSON, Texas, Chairwoman ZOE LOFGREN, California FRANK D. LUCAS, Oklahoma, DANIEL LIPINSKI, Illinois Ranking Member SUZANNE BONAMICI, Oregon MO BROOKS, Alabama AMI BERA, California, BILL POSEY, Florida Vice Chair RANDY WEBER, Texas LIZZIE FLETCHER, Texas BRIAN BABIN, Texas HALEY STEVENS, Michigan ANDY BIGGS, Arizona KENDRA HORN, Oklahoma ROGER MARSHALL, Kansas MIKIE SHERRILL, New Jersey RALPH NORMAN, South Carolina BRAD SHERMAN, California MICHAEL CLOUD, Texas STEVE COHEN, Tennessee TROY BALDERSON, Ohio JERRY McNERNEY, California PETE OLSON, Texas ED PERLMUTTER, Colorado ANTHONY GONZALEZ, Ohio PAUL TONKO, New York MICHAEL WALTZ, Florida BILL FOSTER, Illinois JIM BAIRD, Indiana DON BEYER, Virginia JAIME HERRERA BEUTLER, Washington CHARLIE CRIST, Florida FRANCIS ROONEY, Florida SEAN CASTEN, Illinois GREGORY F. MURPHY, North Carolina BEN McADAMS, Utah JENNIFER WEXTON, Virginia CONOR LAMB, Pennsylvania VACANCY C O N T E N T S December 5, 2019 Page Hearing Charter.................................................. 2 Opening Statements Statement by Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson, Chairwoman, Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives................................................ 9 Written statement............................................ 10 Statement by Representative Frank Lucas, Ranking Member, Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives................................................ 11 Written statement............................................ 12 Witnesses: The Honorable Michael McCord, Director, Civil-Military Programs, Stennis Center for Public Service Oral Statement............................................... 14 Written Statement............................................ 16 Ms. Laura Manley, Director, Technology and Public Purpose Project, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School of Government Oral Statement............................................... 24 Written Statement............................................ 26 Dr. Tim Persons, Chief Scientist and Managing Director, Science, Technology Assessment, and Analytics, U.S. Government Accountability Office Oral Statement............................................... 37 Written Statement............................................ 39 Dr. Peter Blair, Executive Director, Division on Engineering and Physical Sciences, The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Oral Statement............................................... 80 Written Statement............................................ 83 Discussion....................................................... 96 Appendix I: Answers to Post-Hearing Questions The Honorable Michael McCord, Director, Civil-Military Programs, Stennis Center for Public Service.............................. 122 Dr. Tim Persons, Chief Scientist and Managing Director, Science, Technology Assessment, and Analytics, U.S. Government Accountability Office.......................................... 125 Dr. Peter Blair, Executive Director, Division on Engineering and Physical Sciences, The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine...................................... 128 Appendix II: Additional Material for the Record Letter submitted by Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson, Chairwoman, Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives....................................... 134 Report submitted by Representative Bill Foster, Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives.. 136 Executive Summary of a report submitted by the Hon. Michael McCord, Director, Civil-Military Programs, Stennis Center for Public Service................................................. 148 EXPERTS NEEDED: OPTIONS FOR IMPROVED SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY ADVICE FOR CONGRESS ---------- THURSDAY, DECEMBER 5, 2019 House of Representatives, Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, Washington, D.C. The Committee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:02 a.m., in room 2318 of the Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Eddie Bernice Johnson [Chairwoman of the Committee] presiding. [GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT] Chairwoman Johnson. Good morning. This hearing will come to order. And without objection, the Chair is authorized to declare a recess at any time. Welcome, everyone, especially our witnesses. The history of a technology assessment function within the legislative branch is tied to our Committee's early history. Beginning in the mid-1960s the Committee's then-existing Subcommittee on Science, Research, and Development organized a series of hearings on the relationship between science, technology, and society and the need for Congress to be informed about emerging technology risk. Several years and many hearings and reports later Congress enacted the Technology Assessment Act of 1972, creating the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA). During its 20 years of operation, OTA created 700 reports on the science and technology (S&T) relevant to issues of importance to Congress. As we all know, the OTA was defunded and disbanded in 1995. My friend and former Republican colleague, Congressman Sherry Boehlert, defended the OTA during the debate to defund it. In his remarks, he questioned the wisdom of disbanding OTA, arguing that the public wanted us to do more with less, not to do more knowing less. Today, the Science, Space, and Technology Committee has its own expert staff, many of whom have Ph.D.s, to help Members of this Committee navigate tough science and technology issues. Science Committee staff also serve as a resource for personal offices across the House, and in some case for other committees. But committee staff are not a replacement for OTA. Our Committee and others also rely heavily on expertise at the executive branch agencies and from entities outside the government such as the National Academies. But the fact is much of the information we receive from outside sources comes from individuals or organizations with a particular point of view that we must sort through. We also turn to GAO (Government Accountability Office) to fill some of our science and technology needs. However, GAO is still far from filling the gap left by the defunding of OTA. In short, since 1995 there has not been a single, trusted, comprehensive, and authoritative source of science and technology advice for Congress. Since its disbanding, there have been a few persistent champions for bringing back the OTA. In the last couple of years, those few voices have become a chorus, with support from both sides of the political spectrum. The reason is clear. With every passing year, scientific and technological issues are becoming more complex and with increasing societal impacts. Absent an OTA, we are often left struggling to make sense of the competing expert opinions but still having to make policy decisions in this murky context, with potentially grave consequences. The alternative is to be paralyzed into inaction, ceding decisionmaking to the private sector or to other countries, including our adversaries. Today's discussion will cover a range of topics relevant to how Congress receives and uses scientific and technical advice. And these topics are all important. However, the central question for today's hearing is this: Do we bring back a modernized OTA, or do we provide GAO with additional mandates and resources to fill that gap? My hope is that in addressing this question, we can temporarily set aside questions of what is politically expedient and get to the core arguments weighing in favor and against each option for meeting the needs of Congress. In other words, I hope this hearing emulates the practice followed by OTA in providing this Committee with the sound policy options, while leaving it to Congress to figure out the politics. While we no longer have a legislative jurisdiction, it is appropriate that 55 years after the first hearing, the Science Committee continues to lead this discussion. I thank the expert witnesses for being here today, and I look forward to your testimony. [The prepared statement of Chairwoman Johnson follows:] Good morning and welcome to our witnesses. The history of a technology assessment function within the legislative branch is tied to our own Committee's early history. Beginning in the mid1960's the Committee's then existing Subcommittee on Science, Research, and Development organized a series of hearings on the relationship between science, technology, and society, and the need for Congress to be informed about emerging technology risks. Several years, and many hearings and reports later, Congress enacted the Technology Assessment Act of 1972, creating the Office of Technology Assessment. During its 20 years of operation, OTA created 700 reports on the science and technology relevant to issues of importance to Congress. As we all know, the OTA was defunded and disbanded in 1995. My friend and former Republican colleague, Congressman Sherry Boehlert, defended the OTA during the debate to defund it. In his remarks, he questioned the wisdom of disbanding OTA, arguing that the public wanted us to do more with less, not to do more knowing less. Today, the Science, Space, and Technology Committee has its own expert staff, many of whom have PhDs, to help Members of this Committee navigate tough science and technology issues. Science Committee staff also serve as a resource for personal offices across the House, and in some case for other Committees. But Committee staff are not a replacement for OTA. Our Committee and others also rely heavily on expertise at the executive branch agencies and from entities outside of government, such as the National Academies. But the fact is, much of the information we receive from outside sources comes from individuals or organizations with a particular point of view that we must sort through. We also turn to GAO to fill some of our science and technology needs. However, GAO is still far from filling the gap left by the defunding of OTA. In short, since 1995 there has not been a single, trusted, comprehensive and authoritative source of science and technology advice for Congress. Since its disbanding, there have been a few persistent champions for bringing back the OTA. In the last couple of years, those few voices have become a chorus, with support from both ends of the political spectrum. The reason is clear. With every passing year, scientific and technological issues are becoming more complex and with increasing societal impacts. Absent an OTA, we are often left struggling to make sense of competing expert opinions but still having to make policy decisions in this murky context, with potentially grave consequences. The alternative is to be paralyzed into inaction, ceding decision making to the private sector or to other countries, including our adversaries. Today's discussion will cover a range of topics relevant to how Congress receives and uses scientific and technical advice. And these topics are all important. However, the central question for today's hearing is this: do we bring back a modernized OTA, or do we provide GAO with additional mandates and resources to fill the gap? My hope is that in addressing this question, we can temporarily set aside questions of what is politically expedient and get to the core arguments weighing in favor and against each option for meeting the needs of Congress. In other words, I hope this hearing emulates the practice followed by OTA in providing this Committee with sound policy options, while leaving it to Congress to figure out the politics. While we no longer have legislative jurisdiction, it is appropriate that 55 years after the first hearings, the Science Committee continues to lead this discussion. I thank the expert witnesses for being here and I look forward to your testimony. Chairwoman Johnson. Before I recognize Ranking Member Lucas for his opening statement, I'd like to present for the record a letter from the R Street Institute and Lincoln Network regarding this hearing. The Committee now recognizes Mr. Lucas. Mr. Lucas. Thank you, Chairwoman Johnson, for holding this hearing today. I appreciate the opportunity to discuss ways to improve the resources available to Congress for science and technology issues. Over the last few years, we've heard that some Members of Congress do not believe they have the resources they need to evaluate science and technology issues. In response, the Appropriations Committee has taken a number of steps to address these concerns. First, they have directed the Government Accountability Office to expand its technology assessment capacities. Since 2007, Congress has funded GAO to do this S&T work. At the direction of the appropriators, GAO also stood up a separate Science, Technology Assessment, and Analytics team. I look forward to hearing from Dr. Persons about that effort, and the plan to grow that team to meet the needs of Congress. Second, appropriators directed the Congressional Research Service (CRS) to commission a study by the National Academy of Public Administration to identify gaps in congressional S&T resources and make recommendations. That report was just released a few weeks ago. And I appreciate the thoughtful work the study committee did to understand the needs of Congress and recommend thoughtful solutions. We'll hear more about those recommendations today from a member of the study committee, Mr. McCord. I believe Chairwoman Johnson and I agree that one of our most important jobs as a Committee is to serve as a resource on science and technology issues that come before us, not just for our Committee Members but for the entire House. We're fortunate to have staff on both sides of the aisle with a variety of expertise in science, engineering, policy, and the law. Our staff provides good counsel, and they also can tap into a wealth of knowledge from outside expertise on subjects ranging from quantum computing to engineering biology. However, I recognize that our staff does not have the capacity to provide the type of support and analysis needed by every Member of Congress. So I'm eager to hear more about the resources GAO is providing and NAPA's (National Academy of Public Administration's) recommendations on how we can best meet our informational needs. In my time in Congress, I have witnessed Committee and Member office budgets shrink and our ability to retain and pay staff diminish. I look forward to hearing ideas from our panel about how to attract and retain S&T talent; also, thoughts on how to communicate to our constituents the importance of Congress being able to have the capacity to fulfill its constitutional duties, particularly when it comes to dealing with the challenges and opportunities of emerging technologies. I'm one of the few Members of the Committee who was actually, I guess the Chair and I and Congresswoman Lofgren were Members of Congress when the Office of Technology Assessment was defunded and when those functions were later transitioned to GAO and CRS. At the time, many on my side of the aisle saw OTA as duplicative of other resources. Many also believed that the office had strayed from its intended purpose of being an unbiased, nonpartisan organization. Over the last few years, there's been a small but passionate contingent of Congress Members and think tank experts who've advocated for restoring OTA. I think there's a tendency to look to the past with rose-colored glasses and that if we just went back to the way things were, everything that's wrong with Congress would be fixed. Well, not everything in Congress worked perfectly when I came here in 1994, and it's certainly not working perfectly now. I acknowledge that. I think there is merit in evaluating what would serve our Members best in the 21st century, as we are doing here today. I still believe the U.S. Congress is the best deliberative body in the world. I look forward to a positive, bipartisan discussion today on how to make it better and to best serve the American people. And with that, I yield back, Madam Chair. [The prepared statement of Mr. Lucas follows:] Thank you, Chairwoman Johnson for holding this hearing today. I appreciate the opportunity to discuss ways to improve the resources available to Congress for science and technology issues. Over the last few years, we've heard that some Members of Congress do not believe they have the resources they need to evaluate science and technology issues. In response, the Appropriations Committees have taken a number of steps to address these concerns. First, they have directed the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to expand its technology assessment capabilities. Since 2007 Congress has funded GAO to do this S&T work. At the direction of the appropriators, GAO also stood up a separate Science, Technology Assessment, and Analytics team. I look forward to hearing from Dr. Persons about that effort, and the plans to grow that team to meet the needs of Congress. Second, appropriators directed the Congressional Research Service (CRS) to commission a study by the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) to identify gaps in congressional S&T resources and make recommendations. That report was just released a few weeks ago. I appreciate the thoughtful work the study committee did to understand the needs of Congress and recommend thoughtful solutions. We will hear more about those recommendations today from a member of the study committee, Mr. McCord. I believe Chairwoman Johnson and I agree that one of our most important jobs as a Committee is to serve as a resource on the science and technology issues that come before us-not just for our Committee Members but for the entire House. We are fortunate to have staff on both sides of the aisle with a variety of expertise in science, engineering, policy, and the law. Our staff provides good counsel and they also can tap into a wealth of knowledge from outside expertise on subjects ranging from quantum computing to engineering biology. However, I recognize that our staff does not have the capacity to provide the type of support and analysis needed by every Member of Congress. So I'm eager to hear more about the resources GAO is providing, and NAPA's recommendations on how we can best meet our informational needs. In my time in Congress, I have witnessed Committee and Member office budgets shrink, and our ability to retain and pay staff diminish. I look forward to hearing ideas from our panel about how can attract and retain S&T talent. Also, thoughts on how to communicate to our constituents the importance of Congress being able to have the capacity to fulfill its constitutional duties, particularly when it comes to dealing with the challenges and opportunities of emerging technologies. I am one of the few Members of this Committee who was in Congress in 1994 when the Office of Technology Assessment was defunded, and when those functions were later transitioned to the GAO and CRS. At the time, many on my side of the aisle saw the OTA as duplicative of other resources. Many also believed that the office had strayed from its intended purpose of being an unbiased, nonpartisan organization. For the last few years, there has been a small but passionate contingent of Congress Members and think tank experts who have advocated for reinstating the OTA. I think there is a tendency to look to the past with rose colored glasses. And that if we just went back to the way things were, everything that's wrong with Congress would be fixed. Well, not everything in Congress worked perfectly when I came here in 1994, and it's certainly not working perfectly now. I think there is merit in evaluating what would serve our Members best in the 21st Century, as we are doing today. I still believe the U.S. Congress is the best deliberative body in the world. I look forward to a positive, bipartisan discussion today on how to help make it better, to best serve the American people. Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. If there are Members who wish to submit additional opening statements, your statements will be added to the record at this point. At this time I'd like to introduce our witnesses. Our first witness is the Honorable Michael McCord. Mr. McCord is the Director of Civil-Military Programs at the Stennis Center for Public Service. He also serves as an Adjunct Research Staff Member at the Institute of Defense Analysis and is a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration. Previously, Mr. McCord served 8 years at the U.S. Department of Defense as Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller)/Chief Financial Officer, and before that as a Principal Deputy Under Secretary for Defense, Comptroller. In these roles he has advised Secretaries of Defense Gates, Panetta, Hagel, and Carter on all budgetary and financial matters. Our next witness, Ms. Laura Manley. Ms. Manley is the inaugural Director of the Technology and Public Purpose Project at the Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. In this role, she is responsible for all project research and programs, including societal due diligence assessments for tech investors, emerging tech briefing guides for policymakers, and strategies for increasing congressional S&T capacity. Previously, Ms. Manley cofounded the Center for Open Data Enterprise, a nonpartisan research organization that works with governments to leverage data for social and economic good. She's also the Senior Consultant for the World Bank Group and the United Nations' Department of Economic and Social Affairs. After Ms. Manley, Dr. Timothy Persons. Dr. Persons is the Chief Scientist and Managing Director of the Science, Technology Assessment, and Analysis Team of the U.S. Government Accountability Office. He also founded GAO's Innovation Lab and directs GAO's science, technology, and engineering portfolio. In these roles, he has led a large interdisciplinary technical team, which has advised Congress and informed legislation on a number of topics, including artificial intelligence, sustainable chemistry, and advanced data analysis, among others. Prior to joining GAO, Dr. Persons served as Technical Director for the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency. Our fourth witness, Dr. Peter Blair. Dr. Blair is Executive Director of Engineering and Physical Sciences at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. From 1983 to 1996 Dr. Blair served in several capacities at the congressional Office of Technology Assessment, concluding as Assistant Director of the agency and Director of the Industry, Commerce, and International Security Division. He's also author of the book, ``Congress' Own Think Tank: Learning from the Legacy of the congressional Office of Technology Assessment.'' Our witnesses should know that you will have 5 minutes for your spoken testimony. Your written testimony will be included in the record for the hearing. When all of you have completed your spoken testimony, we will begin with questions. And each Member will have 5 minutes to question the panel. So we'll start with Mr. McCord. TESTIMONY OF THE HON. MICHAEL McCORD, DIRECTOR, CIVIL-MILITARY PROGRAMS, STENNIS CENTER FOR PUBLIC SERVICE Mr. McCord. Good morning, Chairwoman Johnson, Ranking Member Lucas, and Members of the Committee. Thank you for the opportunity to be part of this hearing and of the effort to make this institution more informed and effective on science and technology issues. I testify today in my role as a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration and specifically as a member of the five-person panel that analyzed science and technology support to Congress. The Academy is a nonprofit independent organization helping governments at all levels solve the Nation's complex public management challenges and, like the National Academy of Sciences, we are chartered by Congress. Our report on this was posted on the Academy website on November 14. As Mr. Lucas noted, this report was prepared for the Congress and at the direction of the Congress in the Fiscal Year 2019 legislative branch appropriations bill. I thank the Committee for making our full report part of the record of this hearing, along with my written statement and for the opportunity to appear before you to discuss our findings and recommendations. As part of our panel's efforts, our staff interviewed over 100 stakeholders. Although they may not agree with our recommendations, we did talk to all of my fellow witnesses at this table today in conducting our analysis. The accelerating rate of change in science and technology in the 21st century brings enormous benefits and challenges to both individual citizens and to those of you who are responsible for evaluating how these changes impact society as a whole. In this context, Congress needs to improve its capacity to deal with science and technology-related issues. You have some resources available to you now. The question is are they adequate to meet your needs? Our task, as laid out in the appropriations conference report, was, first, to review the current science and technology resources available within the legislative branch, including GAO and CRS; next, to assess the potential need to create a separate entity to provide nonpartisan advice on these issues such as the former Office of Technology Assessment; and then finally, to address whether creating that kind of office would duplicate services already available to you. Our report identified several types of S&T products or services that Congress requires to do its work. They are summarized in the table that is part of my written statement. We then looked at the supply of staff resources available to you and assessed whether it was sufficient to meet the demands that we identified. We concluded that current resources are not sufficient and assessed options for filling the gaps that we saw. First, we looked at relying on the existing agencies like GAO and CRS. We also looked at creating a new agency, and finally, we looked at a hybrid approach of building on the existing resources but allowing for some new organization or entity to fill gaps. In assessing these options, we tried to balance how well each option would provide the capabilities that are needed to meet your demands with how difficult it would be to implement and how likely would it be to succeed and be sustainable over the long-term. So let me now describe our recommendations, which is the hybrid approach of enhancing existing capabilities and creating a new advisory office. There are sort of two parts of this recommendation. First is on what I would call the supply side, increasing support resources for Congress, and second is on your ability as an institution to absorb and make use of additional capabilities. So on that first track, increasing the supply of resources available to you, our recommendation is, first, that CRS should enhance and expand its quick turnaround and consultative services; second, that GAO should further develop the capability of its Science, Technology Assessment, and Analytics (STAA) mission team to meet some of the gaps identified in our report and should separate those STAA experts to the maximum extent possible from its audit and oversight function, which is somewhat of a different culture. Next, Congress should create an office of the congressional S&T Advisor, which would focus on efforts to build the absorptive capacity of Congress to include supporting recruiting S&T advisors for House and Senate Committees with major oversight responsibilities so that you have greater S&T expertise in the Committees where legislation is being produced. This new office would also be responsible for horizon scanning, which we would envision being communicated to Congress in the form of an annual report and annual testimony by this advisor. Finally, we believe Congress should create a coordinating council to be led by this advisor to limit duplication across this advisor's office, CRS, GAO, et cetera. The second track of our recommendation is improving Congress' ability to absorb greater levels of information about S&T policy issues. We believe that's just as important as what resources you ultimately decide to add on supply side. We believe our recommendations will address your needs. That said, we also recommend that Congress conduct a thorough review to evaluate the performance of these reforms 24 months after implementation so you can adjust where needed. Finally, we recommend that Congress pass legislation to carry out these reforms. Even if you could do these changes by fitting it in existing authorities, we strongly urge you to pass a bill that lays out the course the House and Senate agree on to create that public record and to force a compromise and buy-in from both bodies. I would summarize our approach as, first, make more use of and enhance the tools already in your workshop. Thank you, and I'll be happy to answer your questions and provide further details. [The prepared statement of Mr. McCord follows:] [GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT] Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you, Mr. McCord. Ms. Laura Manley. TESTIMONY OF MS. LAURA MANLEY, DIRECTOR, TECHNOLOGY AND PUBLIC PURPOSE PROJECT, BELFER CENTER FOR SCIENCE AND INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS, HARVARD KENNEDY SCHOOL OF GOVERNMENT Ms. Manley. Chairwoman Johnson, Ranking Member Lucas, and distinguished Members of the Committee, thank you for calling today's hearing and the opportunity to testify. My name is Laura Manley, and I'm the Director of the Technology and Public Purpose Project at the Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Our mission is to ensure that emerging technologies are both developed and managed in ways that protect the public good. We conduct research on how to integrate societal impacts like privacy, safety, security, transparency, and inclusion at each step of new technology's development, production, and management. One of the most critical opportunities to ensure new technologies are benefiting the public while harms are minimized is governance through the U.S. Congress. Eight out of 10 of the largest tech companies in the world are U.S.-based, giving Congress the unique position and power to create thoughtful legislation on these new technologies. While you represent your constituents in this country, your decisions also have the power to affect billions of people around the world impacted by emerging tech. Therefore, over the past 18 months we've conducted research on how congressional personal offices and committees identify S&T needs, find relevant resources, absorb the salient points, and use that information in the policymaking process. After consulting with over 140 current and former Members of Congress, staffers, support agency leaders, lobbyists, civil society experts, and academics, we've uncovered several issues. First, much of the debate around solutions to the S&T gap present a false choice between building external support agency expertise and internal capacity efforts. We find that both are needed in order to effectively address the gap for several reasons. One, the S&T demands on Congress vary so widely neither a single centralized expertise body nor a bolstered staff would alone address all issues. Two, even with access to the smartest experts in the world on any given technical topic, personal offices and committees still need internal S&T talent to evaluate what they're told, especially when there are opposing views or opaqueness in how experts arrived at their conclusions. By understanding the day-to-day experiences of Members of Congress and their staff, we believe that there are several steps that can be taken on two levels: long-term congressional workforce improvements and near-term actions to address immediate expertise gaps. Therefore, we have the following recommendations. In terms of workforce improvements, Congress should increase budgets to allow both committees and offices to hire additional staff members and pay more competitive salaries, which will help retain the staff they already have. This will ultimately save taxpayer dollars by giving offices and committees the expertise they need to thoughtfully evaluate the effectiveness of S&T spending or recommend other cost-saving actions. Congress should also hire additional staff with STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) backgrounds to increase in-house expertise and capacity. As a current staffer noted, congressional offices often hire from within. Staffers typically start as interns who worked their way up over time. In other words, the traditional hiring process is not necessarily designed for subject-matter experts with years of scientific training. For near-term actions to address immediate gaps Congress should strengthen legislative support agencies like the GAO or revive and revamp the OTA. A new or improved legislative support agency provides Congress with immediate benefits as it reevaluates its workforce. Given the time-sensitive nature of emerging tech that need effective legislation now, supporting an S&T expertise body will help provide timely information for a variety of congressional needs, specifically those that require a comprehensive evaluation of complex technical topics. And last, Congress should connect with universities to build more robust pipelines for recruiting STEM talent to serve on Capitol Hill. Improving S&T expertise within the policymaking community is not Congress' responsibility alone. Many STEM students aren't aware that they could be successful policy advisors on Capitol Hill or even what the jobs would entail. Academic institutions should educate STEM students in the policymaking process and roles within government. In conclusion, to truly fix Congress' science and tech problem it needs to fix its staffing problem. More immediate actions like refunding the OTA or enhancing entities like GAO or CRS are extremely valuable pieces of the puzzle but do not complete the picture. Conversely, only increasing staff salaries and hiring additional STEM talent will not solve the independent expertise gap either. Both are critical supports for each other. They allow Congress to have independent rigorous assessments of emerging tech while also giving it the in-house expertise and capacity to evaluate requests, advice, and proposed legislation. I acknowledge the challenges of some of these recommendations and the time it may take to make progress. However, to fully address the magnitude of the problems this country faces due to transformational technologies, we need an equally significant change to the way Congress recruits, retains, and absorbs expertise. Thank you again for the opportunity to testify and for holding an important hearing on this topic. I welcome your questions. [The prepared statement of Ms. Manley follows:] [GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT] Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you, Ms. Manley. Dr. Tim Persons. TESTIMONY OF DR. TIM PERSONS, CHIEF SCIENTIST AND MANAGING DIRECTOR, SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY ASSESSMENT, AND ANALYTICS, U.S. GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTABILITY OFFICE Dr. Persons. Yes, Chairwoman Johnson, Ranking Member Lucas, and Members of the Committee, thank you for the opportunity to discuss GAO's expanding S&T products and services to Congress. As you are aware, rapid developments in S&T are transforming multiple sectors of society from medicine to communication to defense. Such disruptive innovations bring transformative opportunities but also the potential for unintended consequences. The ability of Congress to understand, evaluate, and prepare for such changes in an agile manner is critical if the U.S. is to remain secure, innovative, and globally competitive both now and for generations to come. GAO is approaching a half-century of delivering high- quality content on S&T topics such as space systems, climate change, cybersecurity, and emerging infectious diseases. We ensure that this work is independent, fact-based, and nonpartisan by applying quality standards that help bring transparency, rigor, and authority to our work. We also apply congressional protocols that were jointly crafted with Congress to ensure that we understand legislative priorities and are responsive to congressional needs. Since 2001, in direct response to congressional direction and priorities, GAO has expanded its S&T portfolio by adding technology assessments, best practices guides for engineering project controls, and our new science and tech spotlight series, which are the single-page printed explainers of emerging S&T issues that the Members have in their packet. We also recently launched our Innovation Lab led by GAO's first Chief Data Scientist. This team will develop innovative analytic capabilities and explore algorithmic accountability in our era of machine learning. Together, these capabilities support Members of Congress and their staffs to carry out their article 1 constitutional responsibilities, that is, oversight of Federal S&T enterprise, insight into key S&T topics, and foresight on the potential opportunities and challenges for S&T advances. Now, foresight means spotting trends before they become front-page news. Our technology assessments provide in-depth critical analysis of emerging technologies and how they might shape society, the environment, and the economy. We've covered many high-profile issues, some in support of this Committee, including AI (artificial intelligence), sustainable chemistry, and nano manufacturing. This year, we added a policy options to our technology assessments, most recently in our work on irrigated agriculture, to further enhance the usefulness of these products to our congressional clients. And we are increasing the volume and speed of this work with upcoming products on 5G wireless technology, AI in drug discovery and development, deepfake videos, and gene editing. We are also pursuing a content-centric strategy for our S&T work so that we can provide such information to Members proactively, as well as on- demand. We also know that our in-house expertise is crucial to successfully producing high-quality fact-based technical work. Our S&T team has now reached over 70 staff, and we plan to grow to 140. Over 90 percent of our staff have advanced degrees, and these in-house experts include physical, life, and computational scientists; engineers of the major disciplines; and other specialists. In addition, we employ staff with expertise in public policy, social science, economics, and law. The diversity of our staff makes GAO uniquely suited to perform effective S&T work for Congress. Finally, for the purpose of rigorous external input and review we have a network of external experts who help us develop and independently review our S&T work from a cross- sectoral perspective. Since 2001 we have maintained a standing contract with the National Academies to help us identify and convene experts for in-depth discussion as part of our technical work. We are also enhancing our relationship with universities and scientific organizations so that we can tap external talent on short notice to meet congressional needs. As S&T increasingly dominates and transforms our lives, Congress' need for timely, independent, and fact-based S&T information is our team's paramount priority. The NAPA panel recommended that GAO further develop its S&T capabilities to help meet congressional needs. Under the leadership of the Comptroller General we already are doing so and will continue to do so. With our unique access to Federal information, our extensive internal and external expertise, and our rigorous quality standards, we can and will rise to the challenge of seeking to meet the S&T needs of the 21st-century Congress. Chairwoman Johnson, Ranking Member Lucas, and Members of the Committee, this concludes my prepared statement. Thank you for your attention to these issues and the opportunity to speak here today. I'd be happy to respond to any questions when you are ready. [The prepared statement of Dr. Persons follows:] [GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT] Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you, Dr. Persons. Dr. Peter Blair. TESTIMONY OF DR. PETER BLAIR, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, DIVISION ON ENGINEERING AND PHYSICAL SCIENCES, THE NATIONAL ACADEMIES OF SCIENCES, ENGINEERING, AND MEDICINE Dr. Blair. Good morning, Madam Chair, Ranking Member Lucas, Members of the Committee. Today's subject is a long-standing one with me, shaped both by my current post at the Academies and my earlier role at the former OTA. So the views I express today are my own based on that experience and not necessarily those of the Academies per se since we haven't addressed the topic in a long time, actually since the 1960s, although that may be something for you to keep in mind. Let me say at the outset the prospect of reinvesting in a dedicated technology assessment capability for Congress has come before you from time to time in recent years, but it should be abundantly clear that such investment in a variety of ways, as both the reports you've heard about recommend, is now long overdue. Today, Congress draws on many sources of advice, but it created for itself four options historically that have been used most frequently for science and technology-related issues: The National Research Council (NRC), the operating arm of the Academies, the CRS, the still-authorized but unfunded OTA, and, more recently, adding to the mission of GAO. Now, Congress created each option for a specific purpose, but in the wake of the OTA's suspension of operations in 1995, the others assumed some of OTA's function. But to date that assumption has occurred only to a modest degree even after nearly a quarter of a century. And to illustrate this I give you three observations. First, following OTA's closure, congressional requests for Academies studies doubled but then the next year fell back to its historical trend most likely because most NRC studies currently are carried out at a different level of policy extraction context than the efforts that the Congress traditionally commissioned to the OTA. Second, CRS' timely off-the-shelf information remains an essential resource, but it hasn't filled and never aspired to fill the analysis gap left by OTA's closure. And finally, as Dr. Persons mentioned, GAO began in 2002 ever so slowly to develop a technology assessment capability. It remains a work in progress, and there are important challenges to mature that capacity. So the salient question is at this point, how best to improve Congress' capacity overall in a way that is authoritative, independent, objective, timely, and tuned specifically to Congress' needs as distinct from executive agency needs. The current needs are compelling enough that that investment need not be either/or among the options. Rather, the result would be more effective overall as a hybrid, that is, to deploy each organization building on its design strengths and realize additional economies from effective collaboration among them rather than attempting to reinvent the wheel in any one of them. The historical OTA experience, in producing hundreds of assessments over its 23 years, has some important lessons applicable even today. By the way, you can see all of the 750 assessments just by Googling ``OTA legacy'' or in better bookstores in the Washington area the CD collection is around. It's a fascinating read even today. But let me recap the three lessons. First, OTA drew extensively and broadly on the Nation's authoritative technology and other relevant expertise through its panels, contractors, consultants, and through participation in many workshops for each assessment. Also, OTA relied on staff expertise recruited specifically to match the technical and policy needs of each assessment undertaken individually. So far, GAO's assessment involvement of external experts has been modest by comparison, so they have some work to do. But overall, the lesson is in order to be unassailably credible, it is essential to engage the Nation's vast reservoir of authoritative technology and other relevant expertise formally in generating science and technology advice. The second lesson, like the Academies, OTA relied on the crucial quality assurance step of rigorous external review of its work, again, from authoritative experts and stakeholders across the Nation. So far, GAO's review remains dominated by the internal processes with some limited external review. So again, it's on the to-do list for GAO. But the lesson overall is extensive and fully accountable external review is essential to demonstrating credibility that the advice delivered is independent, objective, authoritative, and current. And finally, the third illustrative lesson is OTA's statutory technology assessment board of House and Senate Members, informed again by a standing council of external experts, commissioned assessments in response to bipartisan leadership requests from committees of jurisdiction most often from both chambers. Most of the GAO assessments so far have not been undertaken in response to formal requests from the committees of jurisdiction and none so far in response to the bipartisan requests from such committees in both chambers. So there are protocols for the balance of GAO's work that when applied directly to technology assessment need some augmentation. I didn't mean to pick on GAO solely. All the options need modernization. GAO's initiative going forward, as you heard from Dr. Persons, promises features tuned to today's context and in the direction of the OTA standards I just described, although after 17 years, they have some catching up to do. The NRC also is undergoing a major transformation internally that may yield some important ways of providing authoritative S&T advice to the Congress. But since progress toward replicating key features of OTA has been slow, Congress needs to redouble its efforts to develop effective advisory capabilities wherever it resides both in modernizing a dedicated OTA-like organization, as well as enhancing the capacity of existing mechanisms. Moreover, going forward, both reports mention a broader portfolio of activities, products, closer connections with other organizations, enhanced communications capacity, and more collaboration across the agencies. The collaboration feature is particularly important. I think, for example, GAO's well- developed performance audits augmented by its developing S&T capability could be much more effective than an OTA assessment alone in evaluating the management performance of executive agency programs. There are other examples, but they all underscore my principal conclusion as I noted at the outset, that the overall goal should be to deploy each organization in line with its design strengths and to achieve economies and collaboration across the cylinders of excellence rather than try to reinvent the wheel in any one of them. [The prepared statement of Dr. Blair follows:] [GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT] Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you, Dr. Blair. Dr. Blair. Thank you. Chairwoman Johnson. At this point we will begin our first round of questions, and the Chair will recognize herself for 5 minutes. We all agree that Congress is not sufficiently equipped to address the many complex S&T issues affecting society today, and I'd like to go down the line and hear from each of you about the consequences of this deficiency, what is the one issue that Congress has failed to adequately address either through legislation or oversight and because of its lack of science and technology capacity. And why should the American public care? So I will start with our first witness, Mr. McCord. Mr. McCord. Thank you, Chairwoman. The consequences, as a number of panelists have said, is if the Congress is failing to be proactive, then the private sector, others, are setting the agenda for you or other nations. So I think that that remark was very apropos. I would personally rank probably climate change as the biggest issue out there in science and technology space, although there are many others from quantum computing to artificial intelligence. I think that climate change probably would be my number one. Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you. Ms. Manley. Thank you. I think speaking for myself I would say one of the most pressing concerns is our lack of legislation on any kind of real data privacy rights. I think that's related to how we're addressing some of the social media platforms that are interfering with our elections and that are taking advantage of a lot of people that aren't quite aware of what they're viewing and what they're looking at. Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. Mr. Persons. Dr. Persons. Thank you, Madam Chairwoman. Right behind you, Proverbs 29:18 says, ``No vision, the people perish,'' and a lack of vision is one of the key challenges. It leads to errors of omission strategically that result in, I would say, not optimized economic competitiveness, safety, security of the U.S., and so on. And so I think that's the--sort of the consequences of insufficiency I think often would fall in that regard. I would add to the macro issues I think that we're behind on legislatively could involve cybersecurity. It's just such a hard, tough cross-sectoral issue. Even if we have perfect performance from our Federal Government, which we need on this, it still needs our best-thinking university, industry, and so on to solve that hard problem. And it's only getting worse with the proliferation of Internet of Things and 5G wireless and so on. So that's just one. I would say that there's certainly a lot of things to do, and that's exactly why we actually have a sister team at GAO working on IT and cybersecurity all by itself. Thank you. Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you. Dr. Blair. Dr. Blair. I'd say the role of science, technology, and innovation as a driver to economic growth and prosperity is where we've fallen short. The structure of the U.S. economy is changing quickly, and the opportunities for growth and investment in science and technology have to be strategically considered. And I think that Congress can and has to play an important role in that and to have the capacity to look at the landscape and decide where those investments can be most effective, where regulation can be altered, where all kinds of issues associated with empowering that dimension should be considered. That's my vote. Chairwoman Johnson. Well, thank you very much. Ms. Manley, Congress has a constitutional responsibility to provide a check on the executive branch. However, one of the major consequences of Congress' lack of science and technology capacity is an increased reliance on the expert staff working at executive branch agencies and at the Office of Science and Technology Policy. I want to try to make myself clear. We have very great respect for scientists, engineers, and other expert civil servants working across government and value their expertise, but our reliance on them also creates an imbalance that could impede our ability to fully carry out our responsibilities of the legislative branch. Can you talk about this and why you think that it was important to address this in your report? Ms. Manley. So we identified three types of resources that Congress relies on for S&T expertise, and internal resources like committee staff, CRS, GAO, CBO (Congressional Budget Office) but also external resources and then hybrid resources like fellowships, detailees, and then the media. Within external resources, we do reference the executive branch. And while we do believe that it's very important to reach out to experts in other parts of the government, we also think that nothing is necessarily free if that's the common phrase that people use. So being able to have independent reviewed analysis from each committee and each personal office, it's really important for you to be able to evaluate the priorities based on your offices or your committees. So I think relying on these sources is inherently OK. It's problematic if it's the only source that you're relying on. Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. My time is expired. Mr. Lucas. Mr. Lucas. Thank you, Madam Chair. Dr. McCord, in your testimony you state that GAO needs to make appropriate changes in its organization operating policies to accommodate the distinctive features of technology assessments and other foresight projects. Can you highlight the key things that NAPA thinks GAO needs to do to be successful? Mr. McCord. Yes, thank you for that question. A couple parts to that. First, our perception from the people that we interviewed that the panel and the staff interviewed was that there may be not full awareness of GAO's capability given that the STAA office is fairly new. The technology assessment effort is older, but the new office, so there may just be some lack of awareness on the customer side of what GAO is able to do as the capability develops. But we clearly got as we talked to people the concern that the overall mission of GAO is as a performance evaluator, as an auditor. It looks backward but this function looks forward, the function we're talking about today, so there was a concern about whether those two cultures can fit perfectly well and so our recommendation is to try and separate this office a bit from the overall backward-looking evaluating, auditing function partly because of perception of people that you are working with that do I want to fully share everything that I'm doing with someone who might come back in an audit later and criticize that based on that conversation? That may be fair or unfair to GAO, and I'm sure Dr. Persons might want to comment on that. But there is certainly the perception that the kind of openness that you want in scientific endeavors might be somewhat of a bad mix with, you know, the people that are going to come and audit that same issue so that a separation would be beneficial in our view. Mr. Lucas. What about that, Dr. Persons? Can you address how GAO can focus on those kind of recommendations? Dr. Persons. Yes, sir, happy to do so, and thanks for the question. I think the NAPA panel and Mr. McCord was pointing to the issue essentially goes to organizational change and growth. I'll just point to the fact that GAO really started performance auditing in this program evaluation context really in the 1970s. So it's been decades since that time that is now our dominant product line if you will of work. We were started of course as a financial accounting and financial auditing and things, but we have greatly expanded our professional services for the Congress. As our former comptroller general said, we are a world-class professional services organization just happens to work for the Congress. And so the technology assessment is a function that adds in and can fit well to our long-standing--again, as I mentioned in my opening remarks, almost half a century of work starting in social science work and so on but moving forward with the evolution especially led by this Committee on things in the space program or nuclear issues or what have you. We've built up expertise and not just only recently as well, and we believe we can---- Mr. Lucas. So you're comfortable with the question of whether an institution or the history being a review group can also be a forward-focused entity? Dr. Persons. Yes, sir. So like Mr. McCord was saying, essentially we are ex-post in one sense the training in terms of looking at something that's--we have to be fact-based and so on, and we're not about predicting the future as a rule. However, the ex ante work, we've been doing technology assessment, as was noted, for almost 2 decades now, and we also have a sister institution or entity within GAO now called the Center for Strategic Foresight. And that's just because they're not all just in the tech assessment because although all tech assessment is foresight, not all foresight is technology and science necessarily, although it's increasingly moving in that way. So there is a recognition of ex ante work and working toward and doing policy analysis in that particular dimension offering up options to Congress that are balanced that we believe we can do. Mr. Lucas. Dr. McCord, your study committee looked at the option of reinstating OTA or something similar and ultimately didn't recommend that option. What were the downsides of trying to bring back the OTA? Mr. McCord. Thank you for that question. We did not recommend it. It would be, I think, incorrect to say that we oppose it and the Academy would think it was a terrible idea if Congress did that, but you can't help but notice that for 25 years Congress has chosen not to do that, so the question whether the support is there to go that route and sustain it, you know, that's a serious question for us, the viability of doing something that you've consistently chosen not to do. So that's why we believe that if you follow our approach, first of all, you could go that route eventually. Remember, we talk about creating an advisory office which is much smaller in the sort of scope and capability than OTA was, giving GAO and CRS a chance to do more, come back and evaluate that. You could always move in that direction if you needed to, but, again, you look at the fact that Congress has consistently not found a consensus around reinstating OTA. That kind of viability question is part of the equation that we talk about, as well as what is desirable. What is desirable would probably be to have, you know, 500 or 1,000 people dedicated solely to this, but are you willing to pay that, you know, to support that financially and otherwise in Congress? It seems that so far the answer has been no, so that bore on our thinking as well. Mr. Lucas. Understood. Yield back, Madam Chair. Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. Ms. Bonamici. Ms. Bonamici. Thank you very much, and thank you to our witnesses for bringing your expertise here today. I've served on this Committee on Science, Space, and Technology since I joined Congress in early 2012. I, like most Members of Congress, do not have a background in science, although now that we have Dr. Foster, Dr. McNerney, and of course Mr. Casten with his science background, they enlighten us--yes, and Mr. Baird of course, Dr. Baird. All of us know that the people we represent and our policies and our planet will all benefit when we engage the scientific community in our decisionmaking. We're glad to have so much expertise here on the dais, but among all of us we need that assistance. We know our world is facing the consequences of climate change, as Mr. McCord mentioned, extreme weather patterns. We had a hearing yesterday. We know that toxic substances continue to impede access to clean air and clean water, emerging technologies, as Ms. Manley and others mentioned, shifting entire sections of our economy, creating challenges. We know that peer-reviewed, evidence-based science can help inform our decisions. And for more than 2 decades, the independent, nonpartisan Office of Technology Assessment provided Congress with that unbiased advice and information. But today, we're facing the consequences of efforts to defund this important resource. I am cosponsoring Congressman Takano's Office of Technology Assessment Improvement and Enhancement Act to reinstate the OTA and to make it more responsive to the needs of Congress. We won't be able to solve our Nation's most challenging problems without the expertise of scientists, so I'm glad we're having this hearing today. And I wanted to follow up on Ranking Member Lucas' question. Mr. McCord, you mentioned in your testimony that Congress directed the Congressional Research Service to engage with the National Academy of Public Administration to produce a report to study science and technology policy resources for the legislative branch. And specifically, the conference report stated that the study should assess the potential need within the legislative branch to create a separate entity charged with the mission of providing nonpartisan advice on the issues of science and technology. And as you indicated, the NAPA report suggests that Congress should provide CRS and GAO with the resources and authority to address the gaps in science and technology advice, which is inconsistent with the directive to assess the potential to create a separate entity. Now, it's my understanding that in conversations with our Committee staff the NAPA study team disclosed that it did not give full consideration to the need for a renewed Office of Technology Assessment and instead assumed that the GAO would perform those activities. Is that your understanding as well? Mr. McCord. Congresswoman, I would not say we didn't assess it. I would say it's difficult to assess something that hasn't existed for 25 years and compare it to things like Dr. Persons' unit that exists today. That I would agree is a challenge. We did look at both options and, as I said, we recommended that we start with building off of the things that exist today. It's a quicker way to get there in our view. You could ultimately--as I said to Mr. Lucas, you could ultimately move in the direction of going to a full OTA if you found that our approach was insufficient. I think it's easier to start with our approach and build that way if you feel you need to than to try to build the grand structure and possibly struggle and, you know, for several years and maybe not get there. Ms. Bonamici. And I appreciate that it was difficult, but I know you're up to the task. In your opinion does the NAPA report provide Congress with a comprehensive analysis of the options for independent scientific advice if it does not address the renewal of OTA? Mr. McCord. Well, again, I think we did assess that topic as well, but our mission from the report was to look at the questions Congress posed, as you said, and so it was not quite the clean sheet of paper that some of the other panelists here might have. So I wouldn't be surprised if we have different conclusions. To me, the salient point is that everybody on this panel I think agrees that we need to do better, that Congress needs more capabilities. But also, a big point with NAPA was that we felt that creating a lot more capability only works if you have time to absorb it. So the one thing that nobody on this panel, no organization can do is create more time in your day so---- Ms. Bonamici. Which we would very much appreciate. Mr. McCord. Something has to change on your end as well---- Ms. Bonamici. Understood. Mr. McCord [continuing]. Rather than just build something that you don't have time to read. Ms. Bonamici. And, Dr. Blair, in your testimony you discuss how the NRC, CRS, and GAO have assumed functions of the OTA. Sorry for all the acronyms but I know you're with me. They've assumed functions of the OTA since 1995. In light of the limited resources, these entities currently have and given that GAO has not fully implemented its technology assessment plan, do you agree with the NAPA study team's decision to assume that the GAO would perform all of the technology assessment work? And what value could a reinstated OTA bring to Congress if the structure were more responsive to our policymaking needs? Dr. Blair. Well, I think there are several paths to the future. I think that, as I mentioned, the best path is to use the template that existed for OTA that is as an independent, dedicated technology assessment organization. As I mentioned at the outset, it is still authorized, and all of the work practices were there. They have to be modernized just like all of the options that we've discussed today, but I'm not sure I would dismiss it because it hasn't been addressed in so long. The OTA experiment went on for 23 years, and it had a pretty good track record. And I think it's worthy of a serious consideration for a complete look at that. Ms. Bonamici. Thank you. And I see my time is expired. I yield back. Thank you, Madam Chair. Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. Mr. Posey. Mr. Posey. Thank you very much, Madam Chair, for holding this hearing and the options to improve science and technology advice for Congress. From 1972 to 1995, Congress had an agency called the Office of Technology Assessment, the OTA for purposes of our hearing here. Its objective was to provide Congress with objective and authoritative analysis of scientific and technical issues. But as we've heard discussed, it was abolished because it was duplicative and a wasteful useful use of taxpayer dollars. It also strayed from its nonpartisan origins, I understand, and published biased studies. The OTA published a background paper in 1984 on our Nation's missile-defense system in space, and in a Heritage Foundation report entitled, ``Reassessing the Office of Technology,'' it stated, ``Regarding the missile- defense paper that there are reasonable grounds to conclude that the OTA background paper compromised the national security by revealing information relating to the national defense.'' Due to the OTA being a congressional entity, as the Ranking Member previously pointed out, it was nearly impossible to hold them accountable. The OTA's lack of accountability, partisanship, and national security concerns led to its demise. And so we're here today because some Members of Congress have demonstrated a propensity to leak sensitive information, and the history of the OTA in dealing with national security issues makes many wonder about the reasonableness of reestablishing it. You know, does the GAO have a secure structure in place for handling sensitive or classified information? And has the sensitive information ever been compromised as with the OTA paper on missile-defense in space? And the question is for Mr. Persons. Dr. Persons. Short answer, yes, sir, we do. We have all our apparatus to handle classified information even up to the top secret and SCI level. Thank you. Mr. Posey. Do you see any way that the OTA would help your agency with information? Dr. Persons. I'm sorry, the question is would a hypothesized revived OTA help GAO? Mr. Posey. Yes. Yes, would it be of any value to the GAO? Dr. Persons. Well, I think it would be--if a revived OTA were in place, it would be one of our sister agencies that we would coordinate with so that we don't duplicate work. I think one thing that I think all parties are agreeable here--I'm not going out on a limb--is that there's a lot of science and technology work to do. And so I think we would coordinate with them in the same way that GAO's protocols at the start of every study interact or check with CRS and CBO at the moment if an OTA were back. And we did this decades ago when OTA was there. We would coordinate with them on that. Mr. Posey. Do you think money would be better spent bolstering the GAO or reinstating an OTA? Dr. Persons. Sir, our policy--if the Congress wills, we already are growing into--as I mentioned, our aspirational target number is 140 FTEs (full-time equivalents). That is comparable to what OTA's FTE count was at its shuttering as far as we understand it. It depends, sir, if it's a zero-sum game. If you pay this entity versus GAO, that's the delicate issue. We do think, again, there's plenty of work to do even with an OTA, and it's GAO's official policy that we would help support and coordinate with any hypothesized standup of OTA. However, if the question is whether or not we are willing, able to do this, I think the short answer is yes. Mr. Posey. It takes a pretty compelling argument to get most of the people in my district to think it's a good idea to start another government agency which failed before and is doing a job done by other government agencies presently. But I thank you for your comments, and I see my time is about to expire, and I yield back. Thank you. Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. Mr. Foster. Mr. Foster. Thank you, Madam Chair. And thank you to our Ranking Member Lucas and the panelists. First off, I want to thank the Committee leadership for holding this hearing today on this important topic. I've long been a champion of bolstering the science and technology capacity of Congress from both Members and staff. I've been a longtime advocate of the reinstatement of the OTA as a bipartisan, independent source of sound technical and scientific analysis. And I've raised this issue, as many of my colleagues know, many times in this Committee. I'm proud that we successfully pushed for $6-million funding to restore the OTA in the House FY 2020 legislative branch appropriations bill. And while we've been waiting on a final appropriations agreement, I, alongside with my colleagues, Representative Takano in the House and Senators Tillis and Hirono in the Senate, introduced the bipartisan and bicameral OTA Improvement and Enhancement Act to strengthen the office's ability to serve the growing need for technology expertise in Congress. This Act modernizes and strengthens the OTA by enabling any Member to request a technology assessment to be considered by the technology advisory board; adding a Congressional Research Service-style deliverables to the office's function, and duties such as providing briefings and formal conversations, and technical assistance to Members on science and technology issues without the need for board review requiring preliminary findings of ongoing technology assessments, in addition to completed analysis; also requiring final reports to be made publicly available whenever possible and introducing a rotator program to hire experts from academia and industry modeled after the rotator program at the National Science Foundation; and finally, directing the office to be as open and transparent with Members about the request review process as possible. I have tremendous respect for the work that's done at the GAO, but it is a common source of frustration among Members with not a lot of seniority in this operation that you have to, because of the manpower restrictions, prioritize. And very often that means requests by Members without seniority, you unfortunately have to prioritize off the list of things you actually work on. Because, you know, the good ideas in this body come from Members of all different levels of seniority, and unfortunately, you're not able to respond more to that. One of the reasons I believe that restoring and enhancing the OTA is important is that this problem is so important that we need an all-of-the-above approach frankly on this thing. I share Mr. McCord's worries about the political viability of this. It was sort of a sad situation, you know, back I guess in the 1980s when, for the first time, you saw scientific fact become a partisan issue. I think there's probably no clearer example than the one that was raised earlier with the Star Wars, Ronald Reagan's dream of an impervious missile defense. Somewhere on those pile of CDs is the OTA report. It escaped a lot of Members' notice, but we quietly this summer killed the EKV, the enhanced kill vehicle, the latest incarnation of Ronald Reagan's unworkable dream of having an impervious missile-defense system. And if Congress had been paying attention, even reading that ancient CD from almost 40 years ago now, we would have saved tens of billions of dollars. We've now spent more in absolute dollars on the missile-defense program than we've spent in absolute dollars on the Apollo program. And we've gotten a system that we've had to cancel again and again and again despite claims that it's--and so this is the problem that scientific reality is that these kind of systems, midcourse interceptors, just cannot work for fundamental physics reasons, and if you make that correct scientific point, it is interpreted as a partisan political point. You get into similar discussions with climate change. And so this is one of the reasons why Mr. McCord is right. We have to be very careful that this is going to be politically viable because there are real risks that one party or the other will get very angry when it's pointed out that their dreams are not reality. And that's the value of this. You know, if you think if Congress had paid attention to what the OTA said back then, you know, what that $25 billion could have done in science policy, you know, over the course of the last 40 years, it's sort of breathtaking. And there are other examples of the OTA's output. Anyway, I'd like to also enter into the record here a report of an evaluation of the NAPA report, a reaction to it. That really, you know, points out I think things that have already been pointed out. And so without objection, I'd like to enter that into the record. Chairwoman Johnson. Without objection. Mr. Foster. That really, I think, you know, highlights. You were given a charge which didn't give you the clear chalkboard to come up with a complete plan. Anyway, I just want to thank the Chair and all the witnesses for their engagement in this. And I'll close with one last thing. The Belfer Center, I was very, very pleased--Ash Carter invited me to go to a workshop or discussion on this very issue at the Belfer Center. And the level of engagement of that organization toward what they see is a key shortcoming of Congress is something I just want to applaud, so thank you all. Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you. Mr. Baird. Mr. Baird. Thank you, Madam Chair. And thank all the witnesses for being here today. We appreciate you sharing your expertise with us. But, Mr. McCord, when your study committee was looking back at the Office of Technology Assessment, were you able to interview folks to find out how the office did or did not serve the needs of the Members? And then in that same vein can you share some of those findings and what the lessons learned were that influenced the decision not to reinstate the OTA? Mr. McCord. Congressman, yes, we interviewed I believe it was about 127 people, including those, you know, familiar with the old OTA. But our task was not to evaluate whether OTA when it existed was as good as it should have been, should be brought back exactly as it was. We were operating, you know, in here and now. So although looking back at OTA was part of what we did, it was not the focus I guess of our task from the appropriations conference. So I would not to want to represent our report as authoritative on whether OTA succeeded or failed in its time. That's really not what we were looking at. We were just trying to look at what would happen--you know, what are the options before us today and again trying to make some judgments partly on what is this body and the other body willing to do given the history of relative inaction on this subject. Mr. Baird. So, Dr. Blair, Dr. Persons testified that GAO uses the National Academies as a resource. Can you talk about how the GAO and the National Academies are coordinating and how you think the GAO could better utilize the Academies as it expands its science and technology work? Dr. Blair. I don't remember when the contract started. It was quite a while ago. Dr. Persons. 2001. Dr. Blair. 2001. It was an illustration, I think, of the collaboration that is essential for success in the future of how this family of organizations can get more out of the collection than just the sum of the parts. That particular contract is to use the Academies' Rolodex if you will to identify the best and brightest minds, technical minds principally, associated with an assessment on the table, and that that group of experts then can be used both to inform the assessment ongoing at GAO and to be a source of some degree of external review as the assessment goes forward. Mr. Baird. Sorry, I have one more question for you then along that same vein. The National Academies of Science were created in 1863 by a congressional charter. Dr. Blair. Yes. Mr. Baird. That was approved by President Lincoln. And they were tasked with serving as an advisor to the Federal Government on science and technology. Do you have any recommendations for how Congress can better utilize the National Academies? And do you have any recommendations for how the National Academies can better serve Congress? Dr. Blair. That's a very good question. I think I might mention that right now the Academies is undergoing a transformation. The National Research Council, the operating arm, is undergoing a transformation to examine better ways that it can advise both the executive branch and the Congress. I think many of the things that are addressed in both of the reports such as producing shorter, more timely reports, being able to provide information while an Academies study is ongoing, and all kinds of different modalities for being able to advise the Congress are certainly being considered as we go along. At the same time, Congress needs to be a receptor to the advice provided by the Academies to figure out where it best fits. And I think continued conversations like we're having with this Committee will very much provide opportunities for improving that impedance match going forward. Mr. Baird. Madam Chair, I'm out of time, but I think Dr. Persons would like to say something. Is that OK if we go on? Chairwoman Johnson. Yes. Dr. Persons. Just a quick response just from the GAO answer to how we're coordinating with the National Academies, as Dr. Blair noted. In 2001, we started our standing contract. We use it on a broad array of technical work. By the way, it's important that GAO has precisely defined technology assessment in a particular product line way, right, whereas I believe there's an apples-orange risk here where essentially everything OTA did is really science and technology policy when you really think about it from an oversight, insight, foresight process. So on many of our reports, including our oversight things when they are particularly technical like our antibiotic resistance report or superbug that's about to come out, emerging infectious disease work, that sort of thing, we routinely engage with them early on through the design and lifecycle process and review toward the end. Second, what we're doing is also now doing partnered work. We're about to issue a jointly branded report with the National Academy of Medicine on artificial intelligence and health care for drug discovery and development. And so that's one of a series. There'll be others that are coming on, diagnostic medicine, as well as delivery of care, but that's that piece. And then third, based upon the sustainable chemistry work that we did for this Committee and that informed the SCRD, the Sustainable Chemistry Research Development Act out of this Committee, we are also looking at and building a partnership with a different board of the National Academies on how to estimate or compute the economic impact or GDP on chemistry on the whole economy, which has not been done yet. So we're proud to be partnered where we are. They've been a key partnership with us, and we do extensive work with them. Thank you. Mr. Baird. Thank you, and I yield back. Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. Mr. Beyer. Mr. Beyer. Thank you, Madam Chair, very much. Ms. Manley, I really appreciate your addressing the elephant in the room, which is the need for additional congressional resources for staff capacity. I underlined in your report congressional staffers are overworked and underpaid, they tend to come from liberal arts backgrounds, extremely broad portfolios. Even in our small office I'm trying to figure out when the portfolios are so broad, you know, who's going to do what. And I would argue that we have to have a dualfold approach, and one of them is a lot more resources for the congressional offices. So I was really glad to see the Belfer Center report address this. And this is due to the low MRAs, the resources that we have, and the fact that so often our folks are interns. I think virtually everyone in my office except the chief started as an intern. The wonderful young woman behind me was our best intern, so we hired her and on you go. And as a result we look and see that, you know, we've had no COLA (cost of living allowances) for 15 years, there's no housing allowance, so some significant percentage of Members of Congress sleep on their couches in their own office. So you say it's a simple solution to raise Members' personal office budgets, remove the cap on office personnel, and increase the staff pay ceiling. So I want to get to the simple part of that. You know, we're the politicians up here, and we've not been able to figure out how to do that. What's the perspective from the Belfer Center? Ms. Manley. I don't think we have a special formula for doing that, and we do acknowledge that this would take a long time and it's a politically difficult task. But a lot of this conversation even in today's hearing has been about either reinstating the OTA or bolstering other agencies like CRS and GAO. And frankly, I personally think that both of these options are good things. But even if we reinstate the OTA and we continue on building up GAO, if we don't have better staff in offices, you might not be able to absorb the information in the first place. So, again, I don't have a silver-bullet answer on how to address making this possible, but I think making the case that even if you do move forward with these other options, if you don't address the root problems, then it really won't make a difference in the long run. Mr. Beyer. Yes. One of the other things, I'm used to running a business where everyone stays for 25 years, and it's been really difficult to understand that the wonderful young people with beautiful educations that I hire I can count on for maybe 18 months because they're so underpaid they have to go do something else. They've got to go to law school or Kennedy School or the like. But there is a Committee on Modernization. We need to continue to take this to them. They've come out on a bipartisan way and said we need a new OTA, but we also need to really invest in our own people. I also think some of the great breakthroughs in my office has had when we had scientists from the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) 2 different years, so we actually had scientists that we weren't paying for that helped us really advance causes and develop good legislation. Dr. Blair, you recommended that Congress enact new authorizing legislation, blah, blah, blah, but also to provide for deliberative hearing process and congressional debate. How do you see that different from what we have right now? What would that enhancement be? And I say this with the perspective of floor time is so desperately scarce in this place right now. Dr. Blair. I'm not sure I fully--you mean the broader scope of technology assessment as it--to inform the decisionmaking process? Or do you mean replacing hearings? I'm not quite following you. Mr. Beyer. I'm not sure. This was in the panel recommendation. Dr. Blair. Oh, no, that---- Mr. Beyer. Maybe I'm addressing it to the wrong person. Dr. Blair. That's probably the NAPA report. Mr. Beyer. Oh, the NAPA report. So, Mr. McCord, did you have a different idea, though, about a deliberative hearing process and congressional floor debate? Mr. McCord. Well, I think---- Mr. Beyer. As it affects science and---- Mr. McCord. Thank you, Mr. Beyer. First of all, I would say I would agree completely with what Professor Manley's report said about the problems, and your observations about staff being overworked, underpaid, and not having--you do have to put more money against this, and all the options on the table. As I think Professor Manley observed, all the options are going to cost money somewhere, whether you enhance OTA, add any more billets at GAO. But without your ability to absorb more, yes, I think that that would be an issue that you're going to underperform on your investments in creating supply of new capability if you don't increase your ability to absorb it. So we agree with a lot of the diagnosis that the Belfer Center has in its report about how we got to this place and to the comments you've made, too, about basically a self-imposed salary cap. For understandable reasons, staff can't make more than you do. You know, Members have not raised their own pay. So that is clearly part of the issue. But, as I said also in response to a previous question, no amount of financial resources create more time for you, and you observed a hearing time, floor time, you know, could be a challenge, and floor time is not under any one committee's control. But if no more time is devoted to these issues, then it's hard to see how you're going to advance the public interest in the way that I think everybody in the room would like to see. So Members have to find time in their day to understand these issues. You have to be able to afford staff that can get you this quality information. So, yes, that's what I will call the supply of your time and your resources, as well as--is very important in this matter. Mr. Beyer. Great, thank you very much. Madam Chair, I yield back. Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. Mr. Babin. Mr. Babin. Yes, ma'am. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, expert witnesses, for being here. Dr. Persons, I'd like to ask you a couple of questions if you don't mind. I want to thank you very much for your service and thank you for GAO's excellent service, do a fantastic job. We really appreciate that. As we've heard today, the National Academy of Public Administration report recommends that Congress should not stand up an OTA-like entity within the legislative branch but instead should provide the Government Accountability Office and the Congressional Research Service with the authority and resources to build their science and technology capacity. Do you agree that this would be a better use of taxpayer money in our country? And are there any authorities that GAO is currently lacking that is impeding it from building up its science and technology capacity? Dr. Persons. Thank you. First of all, let me return the thanks. Thanks, Mr. Babin, for the question---- Mr. Babin. You're welcome. Dr. Persons [continuing]. For the compliment as well. We have an extraordinary staff that we've built and doing very important work, so appreciate that. In terms of our view on the capabilities or the capacity, we don't have an official position on whether or not we can do everything that's at, but we do believe we can do a good deal of the oversight, insight, foresight umbrella of work that we believe Congress has. We believe we're uniquely positioned to be able to just--the burden for Congress is but ask the questions that may pertain to science and technology and then we can work inversely to solve that and provide that in that case. Mr. Babin. Absolutely. Dr. Persons. I think it's significant, sir, that you have both Belfer and NAPA independently came from this from absorptive conclusion as well. I thought that was a very important--I was impressed with the studies in terms of the quality and what they were doing, and I think when you look at where they came out, that particular piece is important because it's one--in addition to Dr. Blair, I have other senior former OTA officials, some of which said, you know, the U.S. Congress is the most advised body in the world. So having more input is not necessarily I think the key challenge, although we always want quality of input in filtering and selecting. Mr. Babin. OK. Dr. Persons. So I think that's where we are on that. Mr. Babin. Great. And then what I most appreciate about GAO is the trusted nonpartisan information that it provides on the performance of Federal programs. And so I would ask you this. How does GAO ensure that it produces fact-based information that meets those rigorous standards? Dr. Persons. Yes, sir. So you can't get a report out of GAO if it's not all about the facts and what's provable, what's documented, and so on. We have the Government Auditing Standards that have been around for decades. We literally wrote the book. We're nearly a century old as an institution having done that. A lot of that, what we call the yellow book is essentially the scientific method in accountancy language. Did you get the right data, is it fact-based, are you getting balance in your inputs? Do you have an independent quality check? Are you communicating the results properly, and so on? And so in that case it's ideal, it really is a lot of it in the scientific method. Then we're also doing the--as we mentioned already, the National Academies partnership particularly when it's technical work to help expand and reach out to. And then, as I mentioned in my opening remarks, we're building those networks into universities and scientific organizations to be able to get the best and brightest. On tech assessment (TA), we just yesterday issued a Design Handbook to go out for a year of review and comment to help us with large public input to be accountable to what is good TA, what are the outcomes of TA, which I think is what the conversation needs to be about in terms of fitting in the absorptive side of things, and how do we vouch for quality TA-- -- Mr. Babin. OK. Dr. Persons [continuing]. Which this is an augmentation of or an apparatus to help work under our quality assurance framework to guarantee, sir, what the Congress needs. Mr. Babin. Yes, sir. Thank you. Just how many Member-of- Congress requests for information does GAO get? Dr. Persons. Well, we issue hundreds of reports a year, and then--so I would say we at least get as many of those, whether it's phone calls, tableside briefings. I recently did a roundtable with a different House committee just on electronic health records and what blockchain or digital ledger technology may mean for that, in addition to hearings and so on. Mr. Babin. So extensive? Dr. Persons. It's extensive. Mr. Babin. OK. Dr. Persons. And I do want to just--Dr. Blair is a friend of mine. He's been keeping us accountable ourselves. It is our middle name on this. But we do disagree with the idea that we are not relevant to committees. On page 13 of my testimony statement, we have nearly a dozen different committees, including House Science, in this case that request our work and that are absorbing and things like that. So we are tied in intimately through our congressional protocols to a broad array of Members and committees and staff and so on. So we are in the position to be in an on-demand, on-call if you just need to ask a question even as a quick can you tell me what 5G is all about, for example, then we're happy to come and do that. Mr. Babin. And that is a very good information, and I really appreciate that. I just think we need to make sure that Congress is always getting trusted, nonpartisan information that is being requested. So I yield back, Madam Chair. Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. Mr. McNerney. Mr. McNerney. Well, I thank the Chair, and I thank the witnesses for your work. I really do appreciate it and see the need for it. Dr. Persons, how much would it cost for the GAO to grow its STAA team to 140 staff, as laid out in the GAO plan? Dr. Persons. Yes, sir, thank you, Mr. McNerney. Thanks for the thanks as well, and it's a pleasure to be here. At 70 FTE, we're estimating approximately $15 million for that, so a doubling of that would be the approximate number in terms of FTE count. That's for the Federal staff that would be on to be able to provide that nonpartisan independence and in keeping with our agency. But we also could have resources to tap into external expertise, so there's expenses at times to reach out and pay for convening of experts and so on through National Academies or others. And we're also updating the flexibility of our hiring process and so on in terms of getting--bringing--we bring folks under, for example, the Intergovernmental Personnel Mobility Act, or the IPAs, which other agencies also use to bring in scientific but term-limited staff for a time to augment the permanent staff. Mr. McNerney. So the $30 million that you aimed at, that's just personnel? That doesn't include outside activities? Dr. Persons. Any hypothesized outside--that's correct, so-- -- Mr. McNerney. Thank you. Dr. Blair, what was the OTA's budget at the time it was defunded. Dr. Blair. Twenty-five million dollars. Mr. McNerney. OK. And that's about $37 million in today's budget, today's dollars? Dr. Blair. That sounds about right. Mr. McNerney. Thank you. Mr. McCord, how did the NAPA study team incorporate the operating costs of an enhanced GAO versus a renewed OTA in its analysis? Mr. McCord. Congressman, we were not asked to do a cost- benefit analysis of whether, you know, a marginal dollar would be better here or there. We were looking really more at the capability. We did not advocate a specific number of people that GAO should add, so therefore, there was not a price tag on 10 more people or 100 more people at GAO versus the office that we recommend--we recommended a fairly small amount for the advisory office, only in the $5-$10 million range. I think our main point with respect to GAO was that, again, the TA effort is 17 years old, 18 years old. But the new office is relatively new, I think only within the last year so that we believe it should be given a chance to do more, but we didn't price out how much, you know, you might be willing to spend to let them do a little more, add more capability. That would be one of the many decisions that you face in terms of how much you as a body and the other body as well are willing to pay for more capability, which everybody seems to agree that we need. Mr. McNerney. Thank you. Again, Dr. Blair, the consensus studies produced by the Academies are the gold standard for evidence-based advice and have directly informed the work of this Committee. Thank you. The NAPA study team determined that the Academies' consensus model is not well-suited for assessing policy options. Do you agree with that? Dr. Blair. To a degree. By far, the bulk of what we are asked to do at the Academies are more narrowly prescribed studies, that is, you come to us for an authoritative view on what to do. When there are deep ideological differences or policy differences, then the model such as the old OTA model of articulating completely the consequences of alternative pathways without recommending a particular course of action is something we don't do very often. We could do it more, particularly if we're asked in those terms. But historically, by far the bulk of our work is to have an authoritative committee come in and produce a report that provides an authoritative view on where we should go usually in a somewhat more narrowly defined topic than a broad topic like the future of biotechnology or quantum computing or something like that. Mr. McNerney. Artificial intelligence. Dr. Blair. Or artificial intelligence. Mr. McNerney. Ms. Manley, I was intrigued by your study of former Members. What led you to take that approach? And do you think that that was as informative as other approaches might be? Ms. Manley. Our approach was driven by our interest to understand the lived experience of Members and their staff specifically. We didn't set out to determine whether or not reinstating the OTA or reinvesting in support agencies was one way or the other. We actually didn't go in with any kind of hypothesis on what our findings were. We just wanted to understand what the experience was, and these are our findings. Mr. McNerney. So that was basically the focus. What is the experience of these former Members give you? Ms. Manley. What's driving the gap, yes. Mr. McNerney. Sure, thanks. All right. I yield back, Ms. Chairman. Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. Mr. Cloud. Mr. Cloud. Thank you, Chairwoman. Good morning. Thanks for being here. And I look forward to the conversation. I appreciate the input that you're giving. Of course, we do have many challenges facing our Nation, and you mentioned a few of them. One that was not mentioned that is of primary concern and one of the biggest challenges to our Nation of course is our national debt and the fiscal issues. You know, this program was cut for budget reasons back in 1995 when our national debt was a resounding $5 trillion, and we would love to be there today now of course. On the other hand, we do have very real scientific challenges, especially as we consider the global threats that we face and need to ensure that we're able to meet those challenges for our Nation. I was wondering, Mr. McCord, could you kind of recap some of the resources that are available to us as Congressmen and women? Mr. McCord. Thank you. Yes. The primary resources that we look at and study are support agencies, Congressional Research Service not represented here today, which tends to do the shorter turnaround tasks from Congress, and then the Government Accountability Office, which is really the main heavy hitter in the field today that is something that is under the control of the legislative branch. We're well aware that there's many resources out there, the National Academy. I worked on the Hill for 24 years before my time at---- Mr. Cloud. Right. Mr. McCord. My boss was deluged with books that people would come by to give him on topics of every imaginable subject. Mr. Cloud. I have a stack on my desk as well. Mr. McCord. So Dr. Manley referred to this, I think the most advised body. So we recognize that there's the outside resources that you have to assess whether someone has an ax to grind that makes you question their input, in addition to the-- -- Mr. Cloud. Right. Mr. McCord [continuing]. Scientific community. What I think was driving our recommendation for an advisor and perhaps also the interesting re-creating OTA is that there should be somebody that is responsible only to you that is a voice, that is a coordinator that--you know, that you can trust. So right now you have---- Mr. Cloud. It seems to me, and this has been touched on, but that the greatest challenge isn't the amount of information; it's the ability to triage---- Mr. McCord. Yes. Mr. Cloud [continuing]. And get helpful and effective information for decisionmaking. And so I appreciate the fact that the conversation has kind of been geared that way little bit. I mean, we have the leading scientists--access to them across the whole country. I mean, we had Bruce Bimber in here the other day, you know, so we have access to people. But the question for me is how do we get effective information to people, we've been talking about the fact of a bipartisan effort here. I think the better term is nonpartisan of course when we're talking about science because really the data should lead it and not one party or both parties. But I don't have a whole lot of comments that necessarily putting that within the legislative branch produces that. Indeed, in the past, reports were often taking too long and some were withheld by the chair of the committee and not given access to the rest of Congress. And so I'm wondering if in your proposal, do you have any recommendations that address those issues? Mr. McCord. We certainly agree that you need unbiased, you know, nonpartisan advice that you can trust. When we talk about putting--for example, adding an advisor to key committees--not to this Committee of course. This Committee is a little bit of an exception in terms of already having the--you know, expertise on this issue, but on other committees. We certainly do not advocate having Democratic advisors and Republican advisors. I think it would be very much regret if that's the road that, you know, someone ended up going down. But we do think that the committees that produce the legislation don't have enough capability. Mr. Beyer referred of course to an even greater challenge in a personal office, and it is my experience that I think it's probably unavoidable that organizations like GAO or an advisor if you follow our recommendation or OTA if you create OTA, they're going to have to prioritize. They'll probably put committee requests first unless there's a really large investment and capability. I think that's going to be a fact of life. But on the team that you do have, does have to be nonpartisan. And I started my career---- Mr. Cloud. I wanted to get one more question in for---- Mr. McCord. Sorry. Mr. Cloud [continuing]. Dr. Persons. You've been producing reports in the GAO, and my understanding is you've been able to get them to us a lot quicker. Previously, you know, when they would take a year or two sometimes would get a request for a report and it wouldn't be until the next Congress, completely different people making the decisions, to get that information. And so you've been able to do that much quicker. Is that true? Could you speak to that? Dr. Persons. Yes, thank you for the question, and thanks for the compliment, Mr. Cloud. We are working on cycle times to get down to several weeks for the single-pagers that you have in your packet, the S&T spotlights, which are just brief 101s on the technology, up to an intermediate scale, which is about a 6-month--6- to 9-month turnaround descriptive only, and then up to 12 to 18 months in doing that. We do have that advantage of our congressional protocols and our extensive review process. We think we could have the quality and still meet the operational tempo. And that is part of--for the new science, tech assessment, and analytics team, our strategy is to be content-focused not just deliver a report per se even though, as the studies rightly point out independently with Belfer and NAPA, that there's still the need for the larger studies but there's also the need for this agility to reach out and also to be proactive to essentially say, Congress, you haven't asked for this yet but we're seeing something that's coming and we just want you to know about it. Mr. Cloud. Thank you very much. Thank you, Chairwoman. Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. Mr. Casten. Mr. Casten. Thank you, Madam Chair. And for totally selfish reasons I want to thank you all for coming today. I think I can say this with confidence but one needs to be careful about superlatives in this line of work. I think I am the only Member of Congress as a freshman who made a campaign promise before getting elected to restore the OTA. I'm sure that's why I won. It really resonates in the district. The reason for that is somewhat personal. When I got out of graduate school with a master's in biochemical engineering in 1997 I went to work for Arthur D. Little. And this was in the day the internet was coming around but we still had a corporate library that we had to use to do all of our research. And the-- whether we were looking at hydrogen storage technology or advances in battery technology or biomass gasification technology, we had this whole volume of OTA reports that we would go to look at not to tell us about will the technology work but what are the theoretical limits that you can get to in this technology if it did work, you know, with 100-percent efficiency, what would it get to so you can kind of backdoor what makes sense. Dr. Blair. I have a CD for you. Mr. Casten. Thank you. Microfiche, please. But as I'm sitting there--this is 1998, 1999--I'm noticing that they all sort of stop around I think 1994, 1995-ish. And I said to my boss, you know, where's the section of the library where I find the rest of these reports? And my boss sort of chuckled and he said, well, good news bad news. Bad news is Gingrich killed the OTA. Good news is we get to sell a lot more consulting services now because what used to be free to the public you now got to pay for. What the government used to get from OTA they now had to hire us, so we had a lot of work for DOE (Department of Energy) and EPA and USDA (U.S. Department of Agriculture) doing all of this analysis. And so I have the very lived experience that dropping the OTA didn't save the government a dime, probably cost more because my billing hour rates were a lot higher than what the OTA charged. But it probably made us dumber because now you could only get that information if you could afford to pay for it. And it made us ever-more dependent on lobbyists for the information. Now, since getting elected, I love what GAO does. I love what CRS does. It is fundamentally not synthetic. It is a report of what's out there in the existing literature, and when I want to go and find out what are the thermodynamic limits, the way I answer that question now is I hire a good staff. So I have staff that I've hired onto my team who have degrees in engineering and biostatistics and math. That is not the typical congressional staff. And the fact that we now have to go and do that with staff from what used to be provided elsewhere is a glaring hole. And I would reiterate we didn't save any money. We just got dumber. And, you know, back in Illinois we had that FutureGen project, huge carbon capture sequestration. With a master's degree and the back of a napkin, you could prove that that was inanely stupid and would never work. We spent 4 billion Federal dollars to prove what you could prove on the back of a napkin. So, as you might imagine, I am a bit concerned, Mr. McCord, about the NAPA conclusions. And when Mr. Lucas I believe asked you, your answer was mostly about the political reasons why you thought this was best in GAO. Leave us to sort out the politics. Are there nonpolitical reasons why the NAPA report concluded that the OTA from a scientific perspective--given my experience--why there shouldn't be a re-creation of the OTA? Mr. McCord. Thank you for that question. I would say that our panel consensus was that a more modest approach was more likely to succeed, so---- Mr. Casten. But that's a political conclusion. I'm asking leave all the politics aside. I want to know--let's focus on what's necessary, and then we can deal with what's politically possible. What I want is for us not to be dumber. Is there a reason why not re-creating the OTA would be scientifically useful? Mr. McCord. Again, I don't think we would agree with the characterization that it's a political judgment, but again, looking at something that has failed to happen for 25 years, you can have something that's incredibly desirable that people aren't willing to pay for, and you have nothing at the end of that. And that's kind of where we sit today with respect to an OTA. So, again, we do not oppose the creation or re-creation or refunding of OTA, but we think that a better way to get there would be to follow this approach of creating an advisory office that is somewhat smaller that coordinates what's already being done in Dr. Persons' office and being done at CRS and see then if you need more. You can always move in that direction to see if you need more. Mr. Casten. Well, I'm basing basically out of time. Ms. Manley, do you have any reasons why from a nonpolitical basis-- just a yes or no because I know I'm out of time--non- politically that are reasons not to create the OTA? Ms. Manley. No. Mr. Casten. Dr. Blair? OK. Dr. Persons, I'm going to leave you off on that. I just want to close with this. I just got back from the Madrid conference. If the justification for not creating the OTA is that in 25 years we haven't found the political will, in 25 years we haven't found the political will to get serious about climate change. That is no reason for inaction. This is a much smaller problem. Let's do it. Thank you. I yield back. Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. Mr. Waltz. Mr. Waltz. Thank you, Madam Chair. Panel, thank you so much for coming today. I'm interested and just want to talk to you for a moment about the networking gap that you identified in the report. And I just want to echo my colleague Mr. Cloud. I don't think there's a dearth of information out there. It's really a debate of how to access it, how to triage it and make it useful for decisionmakers and policymakers. I represent Florida's 6th congressional District in central and northeast Florida, and the district that I'm in is home to several universities, including Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Stetson University, Bethune-Cookman, and others. And they really are doing phenomenal work, much of it federally supported, in paving the way for research and development in science and technology. And the NAPA report identified a gap in the networking support category, which basically the report defined as assisting Congress and gaining access to outside S&T experts. So, Mr. McCord, what do you see as preventing Congress from fully accessing and utilizing these important critical academic experts as a resource for us? Mr. McCord. Well, as has been noted, your institution gets a lot of input, and you have to then filter whether or not you think that it's got, you know, too much of a personal interest or ax to grind on when it comes in. On the networking side, I think we felt that if you had this advisory office that we talked about, someone that would be the face of science and technology for the Hill, that they would be able to do a coordinating function to be a face that people could reach out to and an ombudsman for an office like yours to go to say I'm having trouble getting the information I need; can you help me get in touch with the right people? Rather than have--it's not to say that you wouldn't have a workaround. You probably do since the thing we're talking about doesn't exist. Perhaps you go to GAO and CRS separately and say can you help me or perhaps you reach out to someone you know and trust, you know, someone like Dr. Blair who's outside the legislative branch entirely. What we think this coordinating office could do, though, is, again, to be more of the face of science and technology and an ombudsman to help you with these problems. Mr. Waltz. Thank you. Ms. Manley, would you add anything to that? Ms. Manley. It's related, but I'd actually like to just get this on the record. Speaking only for myself personally, a lot of this conversation has been about how we would bolster GAO and some of the other support agencies. But from my experience working with large bureaucracies and inside of them it is very difficult to change an institution from within, especially culturally. And from my work with tech startups, some of the most successful ones are the ones that deeply understand users from the start and can design from the ground up exactly what's needed. So a lot of this conversation has been focused on what's happened in the past and whether or not it was political or whether or not it was extremely useful and saved lots of dollars. But I think we've all acknowledged here that if we were to reinstate an OTA, it would be vastly different, completely different from the past. So I just want to get that on the record to say that it isn't a completely absurd idea to do that, but I do think it needs to be done in commendation with GAO. Mr. Waltz. Thank you. And just in the interest of time, looking over the horizon, I mean, looking at long-term trends rather than the immediate requests, how would that office or how would the advisor do that versus what GAO and what CRS is currently able to do? Would that be a specific mandate? And I'm really interested in looking at, you know, decades-out trends that we can start absorbing and hopefully begin legislating toward. Mr. McCord. Thank you. Well, in the panel's view, this office especially at the beginning would not have the capacity to do all of that itself. It probably would need to go out and contract with other people and work with other people, including GAO and probably including the National Academies of Sciences also. And from my background in the defense world, it was routine to have witnesses come in at the start of--the Director of National Intelligence comes in and does--here's what I see. Combat commanders from around the different geographic parts of the world do the same. So it's kind of that model of people that have that broad view come in and tell you what they see. And the horizon can be, you know, whatever you the Members--do you want 5 years, do you want 10 years, do you want 20. That would be something for this Committee and others to kind of give direction to. Similarly, I think you would want to decide do you want them to look at here are the big developments in science and technology that we see, or here are the big developments that we see where public policy is farthest behind? So you could have--again, that would be something that we would kind of leave to you to decide what do you want that horizon-scanning function to be. Mr. Waltz. Thank you. And thank you all for coming today. Madam Chair, I yield. Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you. Mr. Lamb. Mr. Lamb. Thank you all for being here. I think this is a really important topic. I'm kind of struggling with it a little bit because the conversation is at a pretty abstract level. You know, generally what types of advice Congress should get and from whom. Is there a way--maybe we could go down the line--and I don't know who wants to start. Ms. Manley was kind of where I got this thought. But, you know, Members of Congress are not just here kind of thinking up ideas and what to work on every day like philosopher kings or something. We're very responsive to our constituents and the problems that they have and the things that they bring to our attention. So is there a way that maybe you could each specify a problem that we are trying to solve here in the lives of our everyday constituents? And I think, Ms. Manley, you mentioned a little bit about data privacy and elections and that kind of thing. But is there a way for you to put it in those terms that better scientific and technology advice here in the institution of Congress, what's an example of a specific problem we might be able to solve that an average constituent of mine is going through? Ms. Manley. Sure. I think a perfect example where there's sort of a war of experts is on what to do about the big tech companies. A lot of experts even within Harvard will say we should break up the tech companies. Other folks would say that would be disastrous. So I think having an independent expert body that could really weigh in with all of the different options would be incredibly valuable. It's not something that individual offices could really take a look at comprehensively, so that's a prime example of where this expertise is really, really needed in a time-sensitive way. Mr. Lamb. Yes. I think that's a good example. And even within your example, there are those who say some companies should be broken up and not others, like they wouldn't even treat that as one category. I guess my observation is that I don't even think we're anywhere close to a consensus existing in the American public that that's one of the highest-priority problems that an average middle-class, working-class person faces. You may be able to draw those connections in the classroom, but in the real world I don't think that consensus exists yet. So does anyone have anything to say about the way that better or more contemporaneous scientific advice could address something, you know, say, related to the workforce or working conditions or salaries or consumer buying power, things that really people are going through on a day-to-day? Go ahead, Dr. Persons. Dr. Persons. Yes, thanks, Mr. Lamb, appreciate it. And I think I'll just mention two, but they are related. I mentioned earlier in my remarks about just the burgeoning or the unfolding of 5G wireless and the impacts there, lots of opportunities for that technology, you know, exponentiating our bandwidth and things. But it's at risk for creating a have and have-nots narrative in terms of your middle-class working. Is that something that's going to be for urban dense core areas only, or will it be available to the middle class or even especially in the rural areas, some of which don't even have 3G yet. So that's that. The second thing is with respect to machine learning and artificial intelligence, again, a key thing under the leadership of this Committee, there's been some great work on and apparently some draft legislation, but that has a lot of impacts on what's the impact on the workforce. I think the key thing is that it's not clear, as we reported in our 2018 report that it's the jobpocalypse as I'll say. It's not going to eliminate all jobs, but there's going to be a disruption in terms of certain types of jobs. And it's still somewhat of a predictive thing. We'll be wrong in one sense but less wrong if we're not doing this foresight, tech assessment-type work that's necessary in the scientific-advisory-body way. But we're sort of the frog being boiled slowly in the water on machine-learning systems, and that's why GAO's doing this foresight work, as well as tactically, we're working on and synthetically working on machine-learning algorithms and looking at accountability for that because you're going to see it in things where let's suppose a Federal agency may have a hiring system, and they implement a machine-learning algorithm to filter and sort on job applicants. How do we know, for example, that that algorithm, even if it's purchased off-the- shelf from a software company, is compliant with the Civil Rights Act of 1964? So it's that kind of thing where we're moving in a statistical computing world that's necessary for things like what we're talking about here. Thank you. Mr. Lamb. Thank you very much. Yes, it's almost like having interpreters. I mean, it's almost like this technology presents an entirely different language in which we have to think in order to make rules. And with that, Madam Chairwoman, I yield back. Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. Mr. Foster. Madam Chair? Chairwoman Johnson. Mr. Foster is recognized for a second round. Mr. Foster. Thank you very much. I really appreciate this opportunity to finish up on some of the things. I guess the thing I feel most strongly about is, Dr. Persons, I didn't have a chance to compliment you enough on the work that you're doing inside GAO. It is important to reconfigure yourself to meet this. You know, I've been working very hard with a number of my colleagues to try to get the OTA resurrected. Our odds of success are not 100 percent. And, as I said before, I think we need, you know, an all-of-the-above approach here because of the importance of this. And, you know, I think the other thing that I muse about frequently is the fact that we simply don't have on staff. You know, what you really want to do as a Member if you see something, a story in the press, is say, hey, is that garbage or not? Is that a real issue, you know, an issue for my constituents or for my district or for our country, or is that just sort of hype? And so if there is someone that you have right at hand that you trust, you know, if OTA was sort of enmeshed in Congress so there are several people that you would know on a first-name basis, call them up and say, hey, is this garbage or not, that's sort of the dream. Ultimately, that's the sort of help that you get from your staff. And another one of the sources of frustration I think was discussed in the Belfer report is that Congress doesn't have the ability to absorb the information at the rate--even though there are a lot of reports that could be read, we simply don't have the ability to absorb. And so one of my questions, what are the ideas that are out there to provide high-quality sort of long-term--you know, and not rotators or temporary fellowships and stuff, but people who make their career as science advisors close at hand to Congress? Any ideas on what's been tried there? Yes, Dr. Blair? Dr. Blair. Resurrecting ancient history I think, in the OTA experience, one of the sort of quiet resources that the agency provided that I think is aspirational for all the groups that we're talking about here was what George Brown and Ted Stevens, former chairs of that board, referred to as the shared staff. And that is in the OTA experience when a major assessment was done in a particular area, that expertise was then available for all the committees and often individual Members' offices to become really an authoritative resource in that area. And so I think, as the body of expertise develops in whatever mechanism is developed, making as a high priority the availability of those staff to serve both as shared staff of the committees and Members' offices but also as the Rolodex for identifying resources outside the Congress that can be a benefit across the board. So I think that's a mechanism that's important to keep in mind. Dr. Persons. Yes, sir, I just point to just from a capacity thing at GAO, as you know, again, 70 FTEs. We've hit that mark we had targeted for FY 2019 in terms of permanent hires. They are available to Congress now. Again, our design of this is to be proactive so the only burden Congress has to have is just ask the question. And then at times there will be questions that we might not be able to answer immediately or in a fulsome way, but then it becomes a risk-management discussion about what work might need to be done. But when you look at the Belfer Center report, page 62, 63 about the ideal system with this, existing with the Congress, convening groups of stakeholders, serving congressional needs, options-oriented, that implies a permanent staff, which is what we have, as well as this scale and reach-out to not only National Academies but other external experts. A final thing that we're doing is in addition to the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) Fellows program and the TechCongress Fellows, all of which I think adds to or supports the absorptive narrative that you're hearing from Belfer and NAPA, we also send staff on details from GAO, and we want to be able to be embedded where that's possible. In fact, this Committee now has one of the STAA staff with it at the moment. We've had previous staffers on the Hill. It's something that we do because we're passionate about pushing out and serving you in a nonpartisan, fact-based, agile manner. Mr. Foster. Yes, Ms. Manley. Ms. Manley. I think another way to think about addressing this S&T gap is the role of universities. Our follow-up report from this recent one is to understand current pathways for STEM talent to serve on Capitol Hill, which universities have created effective pathways in how can we scale those. So I think it's up to universities to make sure that understanding policy is not just something that the policy schools do, and it's something that's integrated into other types of curriculum like law and engineering and mathematics. Mr. Foster. Thank you. And I guess I also can't close this discussion without just saying we have to do something somehow to figure out how to raise the level of staff salaries so that we can have, you know, this be a viable career. And we're about to lose in my office Susannah Howieson there who handles our Science Committee work here. We'd have to like double the salary that we could offer her to be able to keep her compared to the offers here. And, you know, someone with a young family in the D.C. area, you're constrained. And this is a problem. I don't know how to fix it. And I think if any of us ran for reelection with a platform of doubling staff salaries, I don't think we would last very long, but I think we should at least scale our salaries with, say, the median income in the United States. Well, I thank all of you for your attention to this idea and yield back. Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. Before we bring the hearing to a close, I want to thank our witnesses for testifying before the Committee today and to say that the record will remain open for 2 weeks for additional statements from the Members and for any additional questions the Committee might ask of the witnesses. The witnesses are now excused, and the hearing is now adjourned. [Whereupon, at 11:59 a.m., the Committee was adjourned.] Appendix I ---------- Answers to Post-Hearing Questions Answers to Post-Hearing Questions Responses by the Hon. Michael McCord [GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT] Responses by Dr. Tim Persons [GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT] Responses by Dr. Peter Blair [GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT] Appendix II ---------- Additional Material for the Record Letter submitted by Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson [GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT] Report submitted by Representative Bill Foster [GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT] Executive Summary of a report submitted by the Hon. Michael McCord [GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT] [For full report, see https://www.napawash.org/uploads/Academy- Studies/NAPA-FinalReport-forCRS-110119.pdf]