ABSTRACT
The art of policy analysis—and the institutions Congress has created to foster it—can and increasingly does affect the nature of the policy process. The process will be more or less political, depending on the formal and legal attributes of the institutions that conduct policy analysis for the Congress. This is not to suggest that congressional politics has somehow been replaces by a more systematic method of generating public policy, but only that the outcomes of politics can be informs and improved, and that Congress has already experiments with various institutional structures, and with varied success. The mainstream congressional literature tends not to focus on technology, the received wisdom is that Congress, for a very large number of reasons, cannot make disinterested, intelligent technology policy that operates in the public interest. The term “technology policy” is uses to refer to two different processes and congressional environments.
