Congress Needs Its Tech Experts Back

On July 4th, the charter for the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) expired. While DOGE had wound down and scattered their alumni throughout the government long before then, the nation is still dealing with the consequences of their arson and ransacking of the federal government. Office of Management and Budget director and far-right ideologue Russell Vought has stated that OMB won’t conduct an after-action report—but given the damage, Congress bears the responsibility to conduct one on its own.  

DOGE never acted in good faith, and any claims that it delivered efficiency should be read as subterfuge. Elon Musk and his acolytes were bullying individual public servants even before they came into office. Emily Tavoulareas, one of the founding members of the United States Digital Service, describes technology infrastructure as the government’s spinal cord. Once in government, DOGE immediately began seizing the technical infrastructure and using it to attack programs they didn’t like regardless of the law. They ripped out talent, burned down the barriers designed to protect personal privacy, and carelessly defunded our nation’s scientific engines and sources of soft power. We are still, even now, uncovering more bad DOGE behavior. 

One of DOGE’s first moves was to gain full access to the Treasury Department’s payment systems in order to freeze payments mandated by Congress—particularly payments supporting foreign aid, resulting in delayed payments to public servants. Gaining access to these systems also meant that DOGE could see private information on individual residents receiving payments, which drew an enormous amount of concern from lawmakers and states. DOGE’s seizure of systems also sought to enable immigration enforcement by tying systems together that had been intentionally segregated in order to maintain privacy. DOGE also employed techniques to export data from government systems—sometimes for DOGE employees to take with them to their next job!  

One challenge for this accounting is that Congress cannot investigate what it doesn’t understand. The brutality of ICE’s mass deportation regime is straightforwardly intelligible. The mechanisms of DOGE’s destructive actions require real technical expertise to parse. This isn’t a knock on Congress. In order to assess a program, you need a solid understanding of how the machine delivering services works from multiple points of view. This includes hearing from the public servants who run the program, the attorneys who interpret what the governing laws say, engineers who code the systems that help deliver the services, and the constituents who actually receive the services. 

Digital service organizations like 18F and the United States Digital Service performed this service for agencies through a process called a discovery sprint. This six- to eight-week process often resulted in a series of recommendations or a working prototype that reduced pain points for those administrating and receiving services. This work required a level of humility by digital service experts. Technologists often make the mistake of thinking that they’re the smartest people in the room. As a technologist, let me tell you that this is baloney. Just because you know how to code doesn’t mean you know about screwworm.

While the last ten years saw the growth of digital service experts at the executive branch, Congress does not have its own such experts outside of a few (excellent) fellowship models like the House Digital Service and Tech Congress. This wasn’t always the case. At one time, Congress did have a world-class technological and scientific research organization called the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA). OTA provided Congress with regular reports on emerging technology and science. It was renowned enough that the OTA model was copied by other nations. Newt Gingrich then dismantled OTA in 1995, reducing the effectiveness of Congress when dealing with technology issues. This loss of capacity is particularly jarring today given modern issues like artificial intelligence, social media, cryptocurrency, and cybersecurity. It has also hampered the government’s ability to deliver services. 

Drafting legislation without understanding the mechanics of delivery means that Congress often sets itself up for failure. For example, the Inflation Reduction Act provided funds to make it less expensive for homeowners to purchase heat pumps. However, the subsidy required homeowners to have low incomes in order to get the heat pumps. Verifying a would-be purchaser’s income is a complex process made worse with the requirement that individual states manage the rebates, potentially resulting in fifty different systems. A better option would have been to graft the heat pump rebates on top of existing energy appliance rebates, which would have eased implementation and allowed more people to take advantage. Means testing is a common instrument that sounds good on paper, but the implementation of that means testing is much more difficult than it sounds. Sometimes this is intentional, when legislators don’t want to admit to outright cutting the program, but use administrative burden as a sleight-of-hand to cut the program by making it harder to receive the benefit. (The book Administrative Burden: Policy Making by Other Means is an excellent overview of this concept.) Doing the same thing by accident is, if anything, even worse.

The lack of technical expertise also hurts Congress’ oversight role. It means that industry lobbyists gain an outsized role in drafting technology legislation. Many civic-minded technologists watched the hearings on social media in the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica scandal and were alarmed at how the lack of technical expertise hindered the questioning of technology CEOs. It was clear then and it’s clear now that Congress needs tech experts who work for them. 

The idea of resurrecting the OTA is not new, but is more urgent than ever. The original OTA was a counterpart to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and focused mainly on emerging technology. Given the extent to which DOGE used the technical infrastructure of the government against itself, Congress needs to reconstitute the OTA and expand its scope to include providing technical assistance to committees on oversight and regulation. 

As the Center for American Progress points out, the Technology Assessment Act that authorized the OTA is still on the books but unfunded. A new Democratic majority could provide funding to initialize the agency and begin hiring experts. Because of DOGE, there are thousands of former federal employees with vast expertise on various programs. These roles would include both bureaucratic and technical roles including attorneys, product managers, procurement specialists, engineers, policy researchers, data scientists, former staff at offices of inspector generals,  managers, cybersecurity experts, and subject matter experts. 

New oversight committee chairs could immediately commission the OTA to investigate cybersecurity breaches, privacy risks due to legal violations, degradation of services, and the deadly impact of USAID’s closures. Because these studies are being commissioned by oversight committees, OTA would have the necessary authorities to conduct their investigations. Armed with this new knowledge and expert advice, Congress would have a better chance at improving technology regulation and providing oversight. Aside from oversight, the return of the OTA would also help Congress pass better laws around technology and have greater insight on how agencies may implement the delivery of services and set up cybersecurity measures to keep both systems and people’s private information safe. A revival of the OTA would certainly be challenged by technology lobbyists and government vendors who have long taken advantage of Congress’ lack of expertise. We live in an age where technology has an outsized impact on people’s lives. For Congress to tackle issues like cybersecurity, AI, quantum computing, and other emerging technologies, the institution needs its own experts. 

This moment demands accountability. A fully staffed and empowered OTA could help Congress understand the extent of the damage, what caused it, and provide recommendations on how to fix it. 

Featured image is the seal of the Office of Technology Assessment