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Comment by AdieuToLogic | Hacker News Reader

> The only people who are experts in a particular industry are the people running the businesses that make up that industry. So the government, in order to try to make rules that don't suck, depend on their input when drafting the rules.

That was not always the case. Once upon a time, there was the Office of Technology Assessment[0]. As to why it is no more, one need look no further than Newt Gingrich[1][2]:

> OTA was abolished (technically "de-funded") in the "Contract with America" period of Newt Gingrich's Republican ascendancy in Congress. According to Science magazine, "some Republican lawmakers came to view [the OTA] as duplicative, wasteful, and biased against their party."[0]

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Technology_Assessmen...

1 - https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/10/the-m...

2 - https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/29/gingrich-and-t...

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Correct. Warren proposes to reinstate it:

https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/27/to-curb-lobbying-power-eli...

OTA isn’t a panacea though. You have to figure out ways to make it financially reasonable for people to blow the whistle on massive firms. The Waste, Fraud and Abuse laws might be a good template.

Not the only presidential candidate for it. Not sure if Bernie is for it but I think he’s mostly reasonable and would be for it

https://www.yang2020.com/policies/reviveota/

The OTA didn’t solve the problem at hand. A separate office with even less expertise than the one regulating the industry is not in a position to suggest sane regulations.

What could the OTA bring to the table when it came to regulating something like mines that the EPA/DEQ wouldn’t have?

If OTA didn't solve the problem at hand, the solution might be to improve it, rather than abolish it.

One does not need to have more expertise to come up with some sane regulations, i.e. you can't dump trash in the river, a tax filing co. can't lobby for tax legislation.

Improve it how?

The tax filing co isn't the one going to congress, they hire some PR company that does lobbying to talk to congressmen about tax law. Of course, that PR company just so happens to hire people from tax filing co because they know the industry. With OTA, the PR company goes to OTA to talk about tax law, it's just adding a different step to the process.

Maybe the contacts the congressman is allowed to have should be controlled. Why would he ever need to be in touch with a PR firm? PR is the word Bernays invented to avoid using the word propaganda. Why would it be controversial to limit propaganda?

If one does not need expertise then it seems like the OTA would be pointless wouldn’t it? Their purpose was to add expertise but they were technological generalists with a political focus rather than apolitical experts so it’s not clear to me that they added any unique value despite being appealing as a concept.

What is wrong with being a generalist? If general perspective weren't important then the military wouldn't have general officers.

A separate office could have less expertise but a broader perspective, and be less interested in suggesting regulations (although broad experience might give it extra heft in articulating regulatory principles) than in pointing out both ineffective regulations and attempts to undermine effective ones.

Think of the OTA as connective tissue connecting the different regulatory specialties if you prefer.

What makes you feel the OTA wouldn't similarly fall victim to cronyism and lobbying? Soon enough your head of OTA would just be another corporate flunky like any other agency.

This is a result of structural issues with our government, it's not as if adding yet another office will magically change that fact.

Part of it's the result of extreme centralization and integration of industry, too. If no individual companies work across the entire scope of what a given agency or department regulates, and if there are many such companies rather than just a few, it's harder to draw a straight line between a given regulation and direct benefit to every single one of your potential employers when you rotate back out into the private sector. Would still happen, but it'd be harder to get a small group of industry insiders to agree on how regulation should look, easing regulatory capture at least a bit, and maybe a lot.

It depends on the mandate provided to the agency.

Regulators at the federal level have be de-fanged because of the increasing reactionary forces controlling pursestrings in Congress. It became obvious with OSHA and now even the FAA is a wimp in the face of pressure from Boeing. That's part of a strategy by certain people who want to erode trust in government.

It's possible to structure things in a way that limits politicalization.

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