>The Office of Technology Assessment's (1972-1995) purpose was to provide Congressional members and committees with objective and authoritative analysis of complex scientific and technical issues. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Technology_Assessmen...
> Federally funded research and development centers (FFRDCs) are public-private partnerships which conduct research for the United States Government. They are administered in accordance with U.S. Code of Federal Regulations, Title 48, Part 35, Section 35.017 by universities and corporations. There are currently 42 recognized FFRDCs that are sponsored by the U.S. government.
FFRDCs have a special legal ability to provide “neutral” input on technical matters. In theory Congress could hire Mitre or other FFRDCs to perform this service for them. That might take some tweaks to the law because FFRDC contracts seem to be aligned to specific executive agencies.
Personally, I’m a big believer in Federal in-sourcing combined with civil service reform. Using contractors for public interest positions, even contractors with special designations like FFRDCs, clouds the issue with contract management.
Of course, it’d be very difficult to design Civil Service reform properly and politically impossible to implement it, so creative contracting is probably the way to go for now.
>The Office of Technology Assessment's (1972-1995) purpose was to provide Congressional members and committees with objective and authoritative analysis of complex scientific and technical issues. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Technology_Assessmen...