You Can Also Blame Newt Gingrich for the Obamacare Website Screwup

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/12/office-technology-assessment-gingrich-obamacare

By Tim Murphy and Tasneem Raja
| Fri Dec. 6, 2013

As the Obama administration continues to unsuck its health care website, one questions lingers: How did this important government project get so screwed up? If you ask technologist Clay Johnson, the insurance exchange's problems began, in a way, in 1995, when "Congress decided to lobotomize itself."

Johnson was referring to a specific action lawmakers took then: They killed a tiny federal agency called the Office of Technology Assessment. Established in 1972 as Congress' nonpartisan in-house think tank, the OTA studied new technologies and offered recommendations on how Washington could adapt to them. But then Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) turned off its lights.

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During its 24-year existence, the agency developed a reputation for sharp, foresighted analysis on the problems of the new information age: It called for a new, reinforced tanker design a decade before the Exxon-Valdez spill; emphasized the danger of fertilizer bombs 15 years before Oklahoma City; predicted in 1982 that email would render the postal service obsolete; and warned that President Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (better known as "Star Wars") would likely result in a "catastrophic failure" if it were ever used.

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Gingrich's decision didn't save the government much money. As Mother Jones' Chris Mooney noted, the agency was remarkably cost-effective. One OTA report on the usefulness of technological upgrades at the Social Security Administration yielded $368 million in savings—well more than the yearly budget of the 143-member agency—and prevented SSA from investing in a clunky, overly expensive computer program. But Gingrich had promised to trim the size of the government, and cutting a small agency was easier than eliminating a big one. "It was a way to claim that you had shut down an agency, but it really didn't cost anything [to run]," says Peter Blair, a former OTA director who wrote a book about the agency. Besides, Republicans had found some of the agency's hard truths—such as the Star Wars fact-check and warnings about climate change—to be increasingly politically inconvenient. They liked having experts to turn to, but not when it undermined their agenda.

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