Yet, capture by a particular political party posed a real threat to the OTA's success and authority. To prevent this from happening, it was overseen by the "Technology Assessment Board," which was made up of 13 total members: a non-voting director, six senators (three each from the minority and majority party), and six representatives (three each again).

In addition, OTA was known to provide a range of policy options in its reports, but without advocating for a specific one. This allowed policy-makers in Congress to weigh the choices themselves, and helped add to the OTA's non-partisan persona.

Throughout its existence it released over 750 studies on an impressive range of topics like environmental (acid rain, climate change, and resource use), national security (technology transfer to China and bioterrorism), health (disease and medical-waste management), and social issues (workplace automation and how technology affects certain social groups).

However, regardless of the OTA's pragmatic style, attention to societal impact, and the international praise lauded on its thorough and accessible reports, the 1980 book Fat City: How Washington Waste Your Taxes argued that the OTA was redundant and unnecessary. This signaled the beginning of its long, politically-charged dirge.

More political unease followed when the OTA released a controversial 1984 report that all but called one of President Reagan's pet projects -- the space-based missile system, the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) -- a wishful fantasy. This report was followed by two additional studies, released in 1985 and 1988, that were even more in-depth and just as damning. The 1988 report noted that the SDI had a noticeable possibility of ending up as a "catastrophic failure."

All of this lead up to the OTA's final death knell in 1995 as it was placed on the Gingrich Republican's altar of slashed budgets. In a 2005 article from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists titled "Requiem for an Office" [PDF], Chris Mooney describes how defunding the OTA was as much a political performance as it was a way of making room for new, ideology-friendly science advisory roles:

In OTA's absence, however, the new Republican majority could freely call upon its own favorable scientific "experts" and rely upon more questionable and self-interested analyses prepared by lobbyists, think tanks, and interest groups. A 2001 comment by Gingrich, explaining the reason OTA was killed, pretty much said it all: "We constantly found scientists who thought what they were saying was not correct."

While the OTA has been defunded for 17 years there has been vocal support by many prominent scholars and politicians to either re-fund it or establish a similar method of technology assessment. For example, Representative Rush Holt wrote an op-ed in Wired a few years ago that argued for "restoring a once robust science resource to its rightful place." And the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars released a 2010 report titled "Reinventing Technology Assessment: A 21st-Century Model" that drew on lessons learned from the OTA as jump-off point for creating a contemporary method of assessment.