From Washington Monthly:

“Staff can get any number of industry lobbyists, or think tanks, or advocacy groups, or even academics to come in and give them opinions, and I think that’s not sufficient,” said Zach Graves, an associate fellow at the right-of-center think tank R Street and the head of policy at Lincoln Network, a conservative tech nonprofit. “A lot of these experts have other motives. Think tanks have donors and ideologies, and having worked in that space for a while, the quality of work is very inconsistent.” The result is a war of experts, each with their own data and diagnosis of the problem.

To really fix its tech problem, Congress needs to fix its staffing problem. The OTA is only a tool. Staff need to have the bandwidth and background to make use of it. “You could have all the reports in the world, but if the customers for those reports aren’t prioritizing utilizing that information, that’s not going to be as useful as it could be,” said Zach Graves, of the Lincoln Network.

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