ABSTRACT
Does the U.S. Congress need a new institution, set of institutions, procedures, kinds of expertise or access to experts? Should Congress in particular enhance its capacities to acquire and/or make effective use of scientific and technical advice? Congress, as a set of institutions, practices, and people, is mainly engaged in the task of acquiring and processing information from its environment. There is little that Congress does that is not aimed at acquiring information, processing it through its own unique prism of values, norms, and political judgements, and thus "adding value" to the inputs to produce the laws, resolutions, confirmations, symbolic behaviors, actions, and nonactions that constitute the outputs of the legislative process. Members of Congress rely for advice, first, on their own (invariably broad) circle of friends, acquaintances, and constituents, then on their colleagues, whose opinions they respect to greater or lesser degrees, and then on their staffs both individual and committee, on the Congress-wide support agencies, on experts from the executive branch with whom they and their staffs regularly interact, on outside experts whose views are solicited in hearings or informally, on pundits from the specialized and opinion media, and on the phalanxes of interest group and nongovernmental organization representatives and lobbyists who ceaselessly bombard them with information at every turn. It would be hard to argue credibly that in this decibel-happy information age the modern U.S. legislator lacks "advice" on any topic, scientific or otherwise.
