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resource base.

It enables OTA to utilize the most up-to-date information available. If this were not a practice of OTA, its work would require a manyfold increase of resources.

Collective National Wisdom

OTA is organized to pull together national wisdom on controversial and emerging issues for the Congress by means of unique methods of collecting, analyzing, evaluating, and integrating information from the public and private sectors. These methods include expert advisory panels, consultants, and extensive external review of draft reports from all parties at interest in order to assure accuracy and fairness. OTA ́s nonadversarial approach to problem resolution enables it to utilize effectively a very large and diverse reservoir of expertise.

Activities

During FY 83, OTA published 17 formal assessment reports; an additional 3 have been published to date. As of September 30, 1983, 37 assessments were in progress, including 11 that were in press, with an estimated 20 to be published in FY 84. It is estimated that 14-18 new assessments will be started during FY 84, including 3 projects that have already been approved by TAB and begun in this fiscal year.

In addition, during FY 83, OTA delivered 7 assessment-related Technical Memoranda, 10 Background Papers, and 1 Workshop Proceeding. An additional Technical Memoranda has been published since September 30, 1983. Background Papers and Technical Memoranda will continue to be issued to provide backup to OTA reports and also meet the timing and special needs of Congress. (See pages 21-31).

As an integral part of carrying out assessments, OTA provides, both during the course of a project and after its delivery, expert advice, briefings, testimony, and intermediate results of and follow-on analyses to completed OTA assessments to committees in ways matched to their specific needs and the Congressional agenda. These activities are generally limited to areas where committees view OTA as having directly relevant expertise due to current or past work. (See pages 79-91 and 103-111).

Interagency Coordination

OTA and the three other Congressional support agencies have taken several steps to insure that their work is coordinated not only to avoid overlap and duplication but to more fully utilize each other's expertise. CBO, CRS, and GAO staffs coordinate with, and, in some cases, participate in OTA advisory panel meetings, symposia, and workshops. The four agencies share data on related studies and provide new data as input to each others' projects as appropriate to their areas of expertise. In addition, two or more agencies may collaborate in the preparation of testimony or general assistance for Congressional hearings. (See pages 92-96 for more details on FY 83 interagency coordination.)

Every effort continues to be made to fully utilize information and

but also in the executive branch and throughout the private sector. OTA works particularly closely with the National Academies of Science and Engineering, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Science Foundation in this regard.

Program Outlook

Our Nation faces the continuing challenge of demonstrating that human inventiveness, aurtured by an economic and political system that encourages innovation and productive risk-taking, can enable us to meet international competition and move ahead toward our individual and national goals. The opportunities for science and technology to be used to improve our economy, defense, health, and environment are many. The benefits, of course, do not come without costs and difficult tradeoffs.

In better times, our Nation could afford to follow several promising paths simultaneously. Now, with research and other costs running so high, and with the imperative to cut public costs, more difficult choices have to be made, including not following some admittedly promising paths. This means that careful analysis is a necessary input to decision making because the potential cost of being even a "little wrong" is so great. OTA's job is to help Congress understand the nature and extent of the opportunities, how to reduce the risks and unwanted impacts, and to help sort out the appropriate roles for the public and private sectors.

Our society is in a period of rapid social and technological transition a time in human history which, if we make the right moves, could result in great new opportunities and stability. Alternatively, we could make wrong moves that lead to dashed hopes and a vastly lower horizon.

The transition, and we are now in it, includes a number. of components, among which are the following:

1) In the U.S., we find that the success of our hopes for economic growth of the world's peoples, through industrialization, have come home to haunt us in the form of intense, international industrial competitiveness. Many low skill jobs flee overseas, and middle level jobs are displaced by productivity (automation). New technology and industry provide a partial offset, but the nature of the workplace is in rapid flux. As a result, education, training, and the nature of the workplace are all called into question, driven by changing technology.

2)

Around the world, we face the eventual exhaustion of biogeochemically enriched raw materials, including fossil energy and minerals. This fact, complicated by rising demands around the world, requires us to shift toward a resource supply/demand system that is sustainable over the long run. We are presently using up fossil fuels a million times faster than the rate at which they were produced. The energy problem is definitely not solved. The world's people are now faced with not only diminishing hopes for improvement of environmental quality but also with the real possibility over the next five decades of planet-wide climatic

b

changes due to human activities, that can now be seen only dimly but that could be enormous.

3) The world, especially the developing nations, faces a growing
imperative to hasten the transition from a fast-growing population
to a stabilized population better matched to the resource base.
The present worldwide production of goods and services would
support about 800 million people at the current U.S. standard of
living. That is one quarter of the present world population, which
in turn will nearly double again by the early part of the next
century.

At the present time, we have insufficient analytical methods to project ahead even within the time frame directly relevant to current decisions. For example, the lead time required to build a large new electrical powerplant is greater than our present ability to forecast the need for that plant by the time it is built.

Continuing turmoil in the Middle East has also sharply reminded us that people can tolerate or accommodate social change only at a limited rate. Perhaps our own traditional measures of progress, so focused on the rate at which we consume resources, need refurbishing. It is not a new thought, but it may take on new meaning in the age of programmable automation.

Our hopes for the future now lie substantially in the esoteric world of nuclei, atoms, and molecules. It is a world that few are privileged to understand, yet all are increasingly affected by it. We witness a growing complexity of technology, fierce international competition that did not exist in earlier times, and a widening distance between developments of scientific and technological knowledge on the one hand and understanding of our citizens on the other. This combination of circumstances creates a critical need for thoughtful analysis and information transfer to citizens and particularly to Members of Congress. OTA has become a unique institiution to do this work, by virtue of its bipartisan structure and its carefully developed procedures to tap national wisdom and then to integrate it into a form useful in legislative deliberations.

OTA has updated its illustrative list of subjects that are representative of the kinds of new assessments that we may be asked to undertake. This list was drawn from a much longer group of subjects that has come to OTA's attention via its own work, available literature, interactions with Members and staff of Congress, and from peers outside government. ΟΙ course OTA can undertake only 14-18 new studies each year, so this longer list should be viewed as representative. Detailed descriptions of the candidate studies are also given on pages 77-78.

Relation of Work to Legislative Activities

OTA helps identify and clarify options; exposes unproductive, misleading, and incorrect information; and helps raise the level of understanding in the debate about expensive, complex, and controversial technical issues. OTA's role is neither to promote nor to discourage development or application of any particular technology but rather to help

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determine whether or when it may make sense to have some form of Federal government participation. We identify below some activities during fiscal years 1983 and 1984 that illustrate the link between OTA's work and Congressional decisions:

1.

Industrial Energy Use

Provided the final justification to rescind the Industrial Energy Use Tax Credits in December 1982.

The Nuclear

2. Managing Commercial High-Level Radioactive Waste
Waste Policy Act (P.L. 97-425) incorporates several important
provisions (e.g., a trust fund financed by fees on nuclear I
electricity) that were suggested by OTA's analysis.

3. Coal Slurry Pipeline

4.

Provided an important analysis of economic and water use implications of the pipeline for the debate and vote over eminent domain legislation.

E

Technologies and Management Strategies for Hazardous Waste
Control

Assisted Congress in reaching agreement on changes in the Resource Conservation Recovery Act.

5. Quality and Relevance of Research at the Gorgas Memorial
Laboratory This Technical Memorandum resulted in the Senate
Appropriations Committee restoring funding for the Gorgas Memorial
Laboratory in their recommendations for the FY 1984 Department of
Health and Human Services budget.

6.

Acid Rain and Transported Air Pollutants: Implications for Public Policy - To assist Clean Air Act deliberations, this assessment produced 18 interim products prepared for both the House and the Senate.b.These included several bill analyses and special responses in the areas of control costs and ecological effects. The staff has conducted numerous briefings and testified three times on different parts of the assessment.

7. Technology and East-West Trade Update Debate is still going on regarding renewal of the Export Administration Act. The OTA report helped the Senate Banking Committee to resolve widely divergent views of Committee Members.

8.

9.

Informational Technology and Its Impact on American Education During the 97th Congress, over 26 pieces of legislation were introduced into Congress having to do with the changing skills and requirements of an information society. The OTA report provides an overview of the issues that are raised by all of them. As such, it has supplemented the debate on a number of pieces of legislation and has been cited and referred to in a number of instances. Automation and the Workplace OTA's Technical Memorandum has been used in three sets of Congressional hearings on employment forecasting and technological change.

10. U.S. Natural Gas Availability

Provides a clear definition of the geological and technical uncertainty about domestic natural gas

production and reserves; defines the boundaries of the debate over natural gas pricing.

11. Industrial and Commercial Cogeneration Provides analysis to justify extension of Public Utilities Regulatory Policy Act benefits to electric utilities. This issue may be raised in the second session of the 98th Congress.

12. Increased Automobile Efficiency and Synthetic Fuels Provides analysis concerning the effect of automobile efficiency standards for the continuing Congressional debate over extension of these standards.

13. Agricultural Postharvest Technology and Marketing Economics Research There is much debate within the agricultural and related committees concerning the role of the Federal government in funding research for technologies in the postharvest sector. The OTA Technical Memorandum helped to raise the level of understanding about postharvest technologies and to provide guidance on what the role of the Federal government might be.

14. U.S. Passenger Rail Technologies Interest in the introduction of high-speed rail and mag-lev corridors is resurfacing in a number of regions. This study gives Congress early notice of potential Federal involvement and likely outcomes of that involvement should high-speed rail be introduced in the United States.

15. Assessment of Technology for Determining Cancer Risks from the Environment This assessment has had a continuing impact on debate. It is frequently used as a reference, and it is recognized as having played an important role in defining "environment" as an element in cancer causation and focusing attention to dietary factors in cancer causation.

16. Information Content of Premanufacture Notices OTA's analysis provided the first quantitative information about the Environmental Protection Agency's new chemical program. The study results have been used by various parties to the debate about the new chemicals program. Also, according to people at EPA, the report has been a factor in the Agency's initiating an effort to collect more information about some new chemicals.

17. Wood Use: U.S. Competitiveness and Technology (Forestry and Wood Utilization Research) A current House bill introduced by Congressman Whitley, Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Forests, Family Farms, and Energy, proposes increased research activities supported by the Federal government. OTA's analysis was used in hearings in Summer 1983 to define more clearly the areas most in need of research funding assistance. These areas include smallscale harvesting systems, lignin chemistry, utilization of plantation-grown wood, advanced wood bonding techniques, and hardwood utilization.

18. Wood Use: U.S. Competitiveness and Technology (Wilderness Legislation)