With lobbyists outnumbering congressional staff roughly 19 to 1, this memo argues that Congress faces a structural market failure in policy analysis: it depends on partisan sources for the technical expertise a nonpartisan body should be providing.
Framed as a memorandum to the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration, the brief uses the Eightfold Path policy analysis framework to test five alternatives, from maintaining the status quo to restoring the Office of Technology Assessment, evaluating each against whether it closes the underlying analytic gap, keeps costs low, and preserves the committee's ability to act on genuinely nonpartisan information. The memo concludes that restoring the OTA is the only option that builds durable analytic capacity rather than treating a symptom.
Download the full memo to the Senate Committee.