Bipartisanship and Compromise: Rebuild Congress's Technology Capacity

Neither party has a clean national-platform position that says "Congress should rebuild its own technology capacity first." Democrats have more often sponsored explicit OTA-restoration legislation, while Republicans led the 1990s defunding that closed the office. That partisan history matters, but it is not the whole record. The 2019 Office of Technology Assessment Improvement and Enhancement Act had Democratic sponsors and a Republican Senate co-sponsor (Thom Tillis). The House Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress was deliberately equal-party and was led by Democratic and Republican pairs across two Congresses. Its recommendations on staff capacity, bipartisan staffing, data, and restored technology assessment show that the institutional-capacity argument is not inherently a Democratic or Republican claim.

The Innovation Party's delta is narrower and more structural than the major-party rhetoric: it does not ask for "bipartisanship" as a virtue signal. It asks Congress to create the conditions under which compromise is more likely to be fact-bearing. On many technology issues, Democrats are more comfortable delegating to regulators and Republicans are more comfortable warning against regulation, but both approaches can become evasions if Congress itself has not first built the capacity to understand the question it is delegating or refusing to regulate. This issue's position is that the first branch has to be technically competent enough to choose either path deliberately.