OTA's 24-year body of work encompasses some 750 reports and assessments on topics ranging from acid rain to global climate change to the accuracy of polygraphs. Perhaps because the office vetted these documents so stringently, they have aged quite well. Some, on subjects like bioterrorism, even seem eerily prescient today. Following the anthrax attacks of late 2001, for example, a report prepared on behalf of Democratic Sen. Ernest Hollings of South Carolina noted that OTA had studied the number of spores required to produce inhalation (or pulmonary) anthrax almost a decade earlier. "If this information had been readily available" during the crisis, Hollings's report noted, "it's conceivable that it even could have saved a life." And of course, due in significant part to Gibbons' stewardship, OTA's reports didn't merely address Congress--they spoke to the broader American public as well, in accessible language rather than technocratic code.

... the death of OTA must be seen as a pivotal event in a narrative of increasing distrust of science among the American political right that flows directly into the raging controversy today over political abuse of science by the Bush administration. Considerable and important policy thinking has been undertaken regarding how and in what form OTA should be replaced. But until today's political right grapples with its deep and abiding distrust of the nation's scientific community, and the body of learning and expertise that it represents, progress may be impossible.

OTA's first and most controversial foray [into the Star Wars debate] took the form of a 1984 study authored by physicist Ashton Carter, now a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, warning that "a perfect or near-perfect defense" against nuclear missiles represented an illusory goal that "should not serve as the basis of public expectation or national policy about ballistic missile defense." Carter's report enraged the Pentagon, which asked to have it disowned by the agency. Instead, an OTA expert review confirmed the study's conclusions. Meanwhile, the conservative Heritage Foundation, highly committed to SDI, used the incident as grist for a report charging OTA with political motives and the unauthorized release of classified information. The Heritage study complained at length about Carter's analysis, arguing that the time had come to "reassess" the Office of Technology Assessment--ironic, given that OTA existed, in part, for the purpose of achieving a level of objectivity hardly to be expected from partisan think tanks like Heritage.

From today's vantage point, however, amid increasing controversies over the politicization of science and the disregard for expertise, the decision to do away with OTA appears less dumb than calculated. OTA scrupulously avoided making explicit policy recommendations, but its reports did sift through expert disagreements, rule out fringe scientific views, and challenge implausible technological assertions (including those associated with SDI). Gibbons once even described the agency's staff as blessed with "good bulls---detectors." In OTA's absence, however, the new Republican majority could freely call upon its own favorable scientific "experts" and rely upon more questionable and self-interested analyses prepared by lobbyists, think tanks, and interest groups. A 2001 comment by Gingrich, explaining the reason OTA was killed, pretty much said it all: "We constantly found scientists who thought what they were saying was not correct."