They remind me of Journalists. Most journalists I've met are not centrists in their personal lives. But in their professional lives, they try (they're not perfect, they are human) to stay impartial, but some of your bias will definitely leak into things.
But most federal agencies are simply too large and bureaucratic for individuals to push their own political agendas. (Not talking about the leadership that's appointed by each administration, but career employees). And it's been my informal experience that their hands are too often (rightly) tied by the laws and regulations of the day, in exactly what they can do. So this idea of non-partisan people truly being partisan is often true at an individual level, but generally false at an agency level.
And they do take the non-partisan side of their jobs very seriously.
I'd say the same thing about journalists. 90%+ of journalists are democrats. (Overwhelmingly, white and male democrats.) They try to chart a course of "objectivity" within an overall left-leaning Overton window. For example, 32% of Democrats are "extremely proud to be an American" versus 74% of Republicans: https://news.gallup.com/poll/236420/record-low-extremely-pro.... It is impossible for such differences in world view not to affect your article selection and tone when it comes to areas like foreign policy, terrorism, national security, etc.
I should point out that I'm not talking about blatant partisanship. Judges, for example, seek to be objective. That doesn't mean that their world views don't affect their decisions. Justice Kagan has said that American judges--across the spectrum--are textualists most of the time. How would they approach deciding a Constitutional case in the U.K., which doesn't have a written constitution? Policymaking and reporting are no different. Everything you write that has any substance at all must have an internal logic. It will makes assumptions, and inferences about cause and effect. It is impossible to be "objective" with respect to that reasoning process or those assumptions.
For example, what is an "objective" article on AOC's new proposal for nationwide rent control? Do you think someone who believes deeply in markets would write the same article on that proposal as someone who believes that governments can legislate outcomes? I think a market-oriented person struggling to write an objective article about that proposal would either come across as partisan, or would have to write something utterly vacuous. It's one thing not to expressly take sides. It's entirely another to divorce yourself from your own modes of reasoning and assumptions about how the world works.
I can't believe in all the responses nobody has challenged this statement. What is your source for this? Based on exit polls, in aggregate white men are heavily republican, and college educated white men are still republican by over 20 points. This seems like an extraordinary claim.
And for one tangible data point, in 2012, wikipedia shows 158 newspaper endorsing the democratic candidate, and 112 newspaper endorsing the republican candidate [1]. Obviously not a perfect metric, but that is ~58% of newspaper endorsing the democratic candidate.
Even in 2016, when the Republican candidate was specifically anti-journalists, only 69% of newspapers endorsed the democratic candidate [2].
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper_endorsements_in_the_...
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper_endorsements_in_the_...
7% of journalists identify as republican, versus 28% identifying as democrat. The majority identify as independent: https://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2014/05/survey-7-percen....
So 80% of journalists who disclose a political affiliation identify as Democrat, and 20% identify as republican.
To put that into perspective: nationally, 27% of people identify as republican, versus 29% as democrat: https://news.gallup.com/poll/15370/party-affiliation.aspx. Among the general population self-identified republicans and democrats are roughly evenly represented, but among journalists democrats outnumber republicans 4:1. I would expect the independents to break along the same proportions when it comes to voting.
Another way to look at it is to compare journalists to various demographic groups: https://www.people-press.org/2018/03/20/1-trends-in-party-af.... Journalists are less likely to self-identify as republicans than: urban voters, jewish voters, millenials, asian voters, and hispanic voters.
That is particularly interesting because journalists are more likely to be white and male than the general population, or democrats as a group. Therefore, their party identification is particularly unusual when compared to other white men.
On other metrics: a Texas A&M poll of finance journalists found that 58% described themselves as very or somewhat liberal, versus 4.4% saying they were very or somewhat conservative: https://www.dailywire.com/news/462-financial-journalists-wer....
Nationally, however, 37% of people say they are very or somewhat conservative, versus 24% who say they are very or somewhat liberal: https://news.gallup.com/poll/188129/conservatives-hang-ideol.... That makes the polled financial journalists 2.3x more likely to self-identify as liberal, and 1/8 as likely to self identify as conservative as the general population. That means the ratio of conservatives to liberals is 20x higher in that pool of journalists than in the general population.
From what I can tell journalists at major US papers have about a 60:40 male to female ratio: https://www.statista.com/statistics/625800/newspaper-journal.... I also found this interesting source which seem to say that most newsrooms are about 80% white: https://googletrends.github.io/asne/.
My quick conclusion is that if we thus assume that male, white, and Democrat are independently distributed, we find that 60% * 80% * 30% = 15% of journalists are white males that identify as Democrats. While this is probably the most common combination of these particular characteristics, it doesn't feel particularly overwhelming.
> So 80% of journalists who disclose a political affiliation identify as Democrat, and 20% identify as republican.
That is an exceptionally misleading way of presenting/interpreting that data. 50% if journalists identify as independent. That is a political affiliation. You can't just ignore that group.
I find it encouraging that over half of journalists don't identify with the two main, polarized, often extremist political parties.
>> What is your source for this?
On an individual level, more than 90% of journalists' personal donations went to Clinton. $382,000 to $14,000. https://www.cjr.org/covering_the_election/campaign_donations...
According to Wikipedia, in 2004 the democratic candidate got 52% of the newspaper endorsements. In 2008 the democratic candidate got 62%. These are far from perfect measures but again, if 90% of journalists were in fact democrats then my guess is the number of newspapers that endorsed democratic candidates would be much closer to 90%, and it clearly isn't.
The total donations really aren't really convincing because clearly the vast majority of journalists donate to nobody, so you really don't know exactly what the preference is for the median journalist. I'd also be interested in the stats for 2012, 2008 and previous elections before making any conclusions.
> As of November 4, 2008, Barack Obama had received more than twice as many publication endorsements as John McCain; in terms of circulation, the ratio was more than 3 to 1, according to the detailed tables below.
By circulation, it was like > 75% Obama versus McCain. Assuming journalist employment is roughly proportional to circulation, that suggests that a similar percentage of journalists are Democrats.
This is spot-on. They also tend to think that their high level of visibility into their highly focused sector of government bureaucracy (wherever it is they happen to work) has granted them broad and trenchant insight into the right answers for domestic and foreign policy. This attitude tends to come with a healthy side portion of disdain for the ability of non-DC people to comprehend any degree of political nuance.
Everything I've read about rising home prices has to do with supply/demand and the disruptive nature of AirBNB etc.
But if you as a journalist are talking about AOC's proposal, your main job is to communicate her proposal to the masses, your secondary job is to talk about why it may or may not work.
It's similar to any Republican counter proposal, if there were one that wasn't just based on dogmas like supply-side economics or "market will fix everything". You communicate the proposal and then talk about potentially how parts of it wouldn't work.
Tribalism is shit and really ruins a lot of these interesting debates. But I don't see true tribalism in places like the NYT. My bigger complaint with institutions like the NYT is that they're made of the same elites they're reporting on, so they aren't able to be truly objective.
Organizations like the Intercept do a much better job of "fuck you everyone, I'm going to expose you" than someone like the NYT. But that's not a republican/democrat thing. That's a lack of diversity (diversity of background, not skin color) problem in their staff.
Journalists don't believe it's their job to talk about why something may or may not work, but they really want to. They have a couple of ways to do that.
One is to select "experts" to comment on a story who agrees with the journalist. For any topic of enough importance you can usually find people who will present things your way, even if others would disagree.
Another is to use a library of common phrases that create an impression in the mind of the reader without actually committing to anything concrete. For instance:
• Mr Smith was under fire last night after proposing <X>
• A new idea from Mr Smith has been creating excitement after he launched <X> last night
• According to experts, <Y>
• <Z>, according to analysts
etc etc.
It'd be more honest if journalists wrote "X said Y and I think he's a douchebag because Z" but that'd make them, in their eyes, mere bloggers, so they rely on more subtle manipulations instead.
[0] https://www.commentarymagazine.com/politics-ideas/when-repub...
But it is subtle manipulation. How many articles have you read about failing schools or school funding challenges, and how often have they mentioned that the U.S. spends among the most in the world per student for K-12 education? As you say, presenting news without context or analysis isn't journalism. But the minute you start picking facts for context, or analyzing the facts, you're inherently incorporating your personal views.
That's not "subtle manipulation", that's bias. Calling it "subtle manipulation" disingenuously implies that journalists unscrupulously distort or change the news. Context & analysis is inherently biased, no surprises there, but you're approaching substance-free cynicism when you say stuff like "Journalists don't believe it's their job to talk about why something may or may not work, but they really want to."
> For example, 32% of Democrats are "extremely proud to be an American" versus 74% of Republicans
Disregarding for a moment that this is a super weird question to use as a barometer, this is not sound statistical reasoning. Journalists make up a very small, and very biased (in the statistical sense), cross section of the democratic party. Therefore, their answers to a given question won't move the overall answers very much.
It is like observing that 99%+ of iPhones are sometimes used to browse the web, and that a majority of web-browsing devices run Google Chrome. You can't infer from this that a majority of iPhones run Chrome (or, at least, not very strongly).
https://news.gallup.com/poll/187919/big-government-named-big...
> When asked to choose among big government, big labor and big business, Americans overwhelmingly name big government as the biggest threat to the country in the future. The 69% choosing big government is down slightly from a high of 72% in 2013, the last time Gallup asked the question, but is still one of the highest percentages choosing big government in Gallup's 50-year trend.
As of 2015, 70% of Americans viewed big government as the "biggest threat" versus just 25% listing big businesses.
Wherever the government tries to "regulate" - unprecedented wealth transfer from ordinary people to special interests follows: the health-care(?) mafia, the higher education mafia, etc. Always sold as "think of the elderly/children".
Big Government -> Lobbyists (corruption) -> Corporatism
(In the US, Europe is a bit different, because lobbying is not as predatory)
Surely hearing a perspective from someone striving (at the very least) to be objective rather than ONLY hearing from someone who has clear bias on the issue (the corporation to be regulated) is more likely to be a good thing than a bad thing.
Many local governments are like this, with explicitly non-partisan elections (although partisanship may be implicit). More likely, the powers and resources of the local government are limited such that there's no "slack" for partisanship, and they are literally just trying to keep the lights on.
Using Google's people is like using the lawyer of the guy you're suing.
That isn't to say the lower class has no say in their government - it is why "democracy is the worst form of government, besides all the others". But having an intellectual, technical team of "trying-not-to-be-partisans" helping elected officials make decisions is a good thing, and you make it sound like a bad thing.
There's also the simple incentives argument: Why don't people trust lobbyists? Because they're paid by people/companies/organizations/etc who have (at the very least arguably) a vested interest in a given outcome, so it's hard to trust their motives. Wouldn't the same be true of a government office of "experts"? Wouldn't they have the same incentives to advance the agenda of those who keep them employed?
That's not what the comment was referring to in the slightest. You're disagreeing that water is wet because fire is hot. They aren't completely different things.
What do you think is an actual, meaningful consequence of something like “90% of journalists being Democrats.” In all the domains you cite, I see a general consensus around a right-wing perspective about America‘s place in the world.
On the economic front, U.S. Democrats are to the left of the European (and Canadian and Australian) center in many respects. Macron is a "socialist" that is trying to privatize SNCF. Sweden is extremely market oriented, has school vouchers, etc. The EU keeps pressing forward on privatization efforts in various sectors like rail and utilities. Trump was late to the game compared to France, Germany, Sweden, etc., in terms of cutting corporate taxes.
That’s because Europe has a different historical and political context than the US though? Many of those policies would be correctly described as white supremacist if advocated for within the US context because the US is historically a white supremacist country and has organized much of its politics along those lines. In Europe, they would probably be understood as “fascistic” because, as you’ve correctly identified, many of their advocates descend from this ideology and its history on the continent.
> On the economic front, U.S. Democrats are to the left of the European
Historically, Democrats have supported charter schools, privatization, and kept in place corporate tax cuts passed by Republicans, so I’m not sure this bears scrutiny. While there is an emergent left flank of the Democratic party, it is deeply at odds with the party elite, their institutions, apparatuses, and is stymied by them at most turns.
That’s a weird bit of bootstrapping. France colonized Muslim countries in North Africa, and then when people came to France from those countries the French insisted they learn French, banned religious symbols like hijab, etc. French language and cultural purity absolutely is a sort of at least cultural supremacy.
Likewise the success of right wing parties in Europe. They’re putatively nationalistic, but the strong anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant sentiments make clear they rest heavily on cultural and ethnic supremacy.
> Historically, Democrats have supported charter schools, privatization, and kept in place corporate tax cuts passed by Republicans, so I’m not sure this bears scrutiny. While there is an emergent left flank of the Democratic party, it is deeply at odds with the party elite, their institutions, apparatuses, and is stymied by them at most turns.
Democrats have a strong “party of FDR” trend, which is an anti-market, pro-regulation viewpoint. I’d characterize Clinton and Obama as exceptions, with the “Green New Deal” being a return to the norm. Meanwhile, Canada, Australia, and the EU have pushed ahead with deregulation and privatization under both liberal and conservative governments.
Canada, for example, is basically an example of Clinton/Gingrich’s government trimming and “welfare to work” being applied for 30 years: https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn%3AANd9GcTNKL...
Trudeau, a liberal, continues to promise corporate tax cuts and deregulation. Public transit in many european cities is opened up to competitive bidding. Stockholm’s subway is privately operated. I’m not aware of any privately operated subways in the US. France has extensive privatized water utilities. Europe continues to embrace markets and deregulation at a level Democrats have not done since Clinton.
Why? Well, I don't think English is in any danger. People are learning English all over the world, and I've never in my entire time in the US had someone try to speak any language other the English to me. On the other hand, French, while still a very important language, is clearly on the decline compared to where it was a couple hundred years ago. Lots of French musicians these days write songs mostly in English. I'd be sad if the French language lost its central position in French society, and I think it actually is important for the government to try to stop that from happening.
Also, I don't think that even the "we want to shut down mosques" right-wing of Europe wants to eg. get rid of socialized healthcare.
Le Pen actually tried to join the resistance as a teenager. It is a strongly nationalist and protectionist party which used to be/is xenophobic but it has nothing to do with the Nazi. Trump idea are more radical in a lot of way. Let's not forget he suggested actually building a wall at the border. Also Macron is rightfully seen as center right in France and certainly not as a socialist.
French has been the official language of France since 1539. Having French as the official language is hardly a rightwing position. The question of having an official language is only seen as rightwing in the USA because it's done to spit the large part of the population speaking Spanish. This is purely cultural. It's a bit like supporting gun regulation which is seen as left wing in the USA while not supporting it is seen as being a lunatic in the rest of the world.
That doesn't in any way make his party a offshoot of the Nazi party especially in its modern form. You might be a mere American and therefore throwing the word Nazi casually like a low grade insult. That doesn't justify implying that a third of France is voting for the Nazi party.
> The National Front party leader warned over the Easter weekend that French “civilisation” was under threat as she pledged to suspend all legal immigration and protect the French way of life, toning down her plan to take France out of the euro.
> “Give us France back, damn it!” the far-right candidate demanded at a rally in Paris on Monday night as her supporters chanted: “This is our home!”
> In comments clearly aimed at France’s Muslim population, she said: “In France, we drink wine whenever we want. In France we do not force women to wear the veil because they are impure . . . In France, we get to decide who deserves to become French.”
Who are the people whose home France is?)
If I were to paint democrats in a similar manner they would all be bike lock wielding liberal arts professors and that would be unfair.
[1] https://prod-cdn-static.gop.com/media/documents/DRAFT_12_FIN...
"The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a political mechanism, not an unbiased scientific institution. Its unreliability is reflected in its intolerance toward scientists and others who dissent from its orthodoxy."
The scientists like Spencer and Legates who "dissent from its orthodoxy" that the GOP trots out for its voters actually dissent due to their religious beliefs. https://www.cornwallalliance.org/2009/05/01/signers-of-an-ev...
That's not directed to science. It's directed to the separate issue of public education being a vehicle for eliminating religion from childrens' education, and replacing religious social values with government values developed by education boards. It's a legitimate concern when the government is deciding how you socialize your kids, and leaves you few avenues for opting out. (Also, it's a model that's by and large uncontroversial in most of Europe.)
As to your second quote, it appears 10 pages later. Is there some sort of connection you're trying to draw between the two?
Both are examples of pushing faith above science, which is the whole point of my argument.
> public education being a vehicle for eliminating religion
Public education does not do anything to eliminate religion except where they disagree, as in evolution vs. Biblical creationism.
The particular example of creationism comes from the Texas GOP's platform. https://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2012/06/28/the-texas-repu...
You can certainly see echoes of it in the national platform. That is no mistake.
Surely the nomination of Donald Trump in 2016 should call into question how large of a subset of the Republican party this represents.
If the alternative is a Democrat? You bet.
The Democrat you're referring to never owned any Uranium to sell.
> whose husband is a womanizer and of a very good friend of Epistein no less.
A fault of association with a womanizing friend of Epstein vs. a fault of actually being a womanizing friend of Epstein's does not seem like a very strong reason. The real reason they voted for Trump is the R next to his name.
Yet millions flowed to her foundation upon the completion of that sale[0], getting paid for something you don't own is worse.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/24/us/cash-flowed-to-clinton...
I think I agree with you, both in principle and from similar anecdotes I have from friends & colleagues in the area.
The leadership piece to which you allude worries me, but also the idea that to have a successful non-partisan government office you need to invest a lot of tax dollars to make it SO big & bureaucratic that any individual can't have significant impact makes me a tad nervous from a perspective of favoring smaller government.
Therefore, if the trade-off is between massive, expensive government office that can have some non-zero probability of corruption OR relying on the responsibility of States & Representatives from those States to hire consultants / experts / research the issues, I'd opt for the latter.
I also saw my university’s tuition revenue taken from it and given to a smaller university in the state capital. All because the surrounding population hated the city hosting the university.
You also end up with more policy diversity, so that if you really hate living under the rules in one place, you at least have the option of going somewhere else. Consider whether you would rather have gay marriage legal in California and illegal in Mississippi than to have it uniformly either legal or illegal in all places, but the uniform policy is chosen by a coin flip and if it doesn't go your way then you can't override it with local policy.
The result is that some places will be more corrupt or have rules you can't stand. But some places will be less corrupt and have rules you love that you wouldn't have been able to make into national policy. And if you live somewhere with a policy you can't stand, it's much more feasible for you as an individual to actually affect the local policy. And if that's still hopeless then you have the option to move somewhere else with a different policy, which isn't possible when you impose a federal uniformity that makes 45% of people unhappy.
> State and local governments are much smaller than the fed - meaning corruption and influence are bought at much lower prices than the federal.
That's not really true, because the influence you get is in proportion to the size of the government. If you capture 1% of the federal budget, that's ~50 times larger than 1% of a state budget, so it's worth spending ~50 times more to capture it. Worse, then the regulatory capture gets greater economies of scale and becomes proportionally more available to large players than smaller ones, allowing huge corporations to more easily steamroll over small businesses and individuals. And then the rules entrenching huge incumbents are uniform so you can't avoid them by moving your small/medium business to the next town over.
That's the theory, but in practice I think states have less competitive pressure. VA for example shifts massive amounts of funding from the northern part of the state. This has worked due to continuous gerrymandering that allows one party to maintain control despite statewide elections being far more competitive. In practice VA almost can't mess things up, simply by because it's so close to DC.
National elections on the other hand regularly shift power around. That provides constant pressure to adapt and improve. People may not like the FBI, but few feel it’s ineffective.
You're talking about competition between parties rather than between states. And gerrymandering is a problem exacerbated by strong national parties, because the opposition party is then laden with positions from their party's national platform that may be locally unfavorable. Otherwise they could tailor their platform and message to something which is locally competitive in light of how the district lines are drawn, and respond accordingly if they change, reducing the incentive to redraw the lines by making it less effective.
Even then, it only moves the debate to within that party and effectively makes the primary the election. You can still get individual representatives to change their position for fear of losing their seat, with much more ease than doing the same thing at the national level.
> In practice VA almost can't mess things up, simply by because it's so close to DC.
That's kind of the point. DC is a huge outlier created by federal activity.
And it's all relative. Nothing the government of Topeka does is ever going to turn it into New York City, but they can make it better or worse than it is, which is a thing that the local people who elect them or choose to live or do business there will certainly care about.
Whereas if a change in federal policy makes things worse for the people of a given state when all of that state's federal representatives were already from the opposing party, all they can really do is whinge about it and suffer from the negative impact.
> National elections on the other hand regularly shift power around.
That's half the problem. Instead of having many localities with many different policies that are largely locally stable, allowing each person a choice in which rules they prefer to live under, you have national policy that flip flops back and forth based on who is currently in power so that at any given time some 40+% of the people are unhappy with the latest national rules, and the uncertainty makes it difficult to plan for the future.
> People may not like the FBI, but few feel it’s ineffective.
The percentage of US citizens who ever have any interaction with the FBI rounds to zero, and their role is enforcement rather than policy-making.
There are a lot of people who think the current EPA is ineffective[1][2]. And the FCC[3], and the FAA[4], and the FDA[5][6], and so on. What's the approval rating of the US Congress? Still somewhere between Comcast and dog poop?
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/sep/26/trump-epa-ca...
[2] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-plans-to-revoke-californi...
[3] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190702/09221042510/killi...
[4] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/09/24/faa-bo...
[5] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/29/my-irb-nightmare/
[6] https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/27/perspectives/vaping-epidemic-...
What is the mechanism for this acceptance passing? If the VA mistreats its veterans, or has a black mold problem in a facility housing elderly patients and then covers it up how does the public vote on that. A considered response should outline both 1) how that selection might work in principle, and 2) and how it might work in light of the fact that voters care about competing interests, e.g. whether or not candidate X has a position commensurate with voters line on abortion, global warming, if the candidate has a familiar last name, if they would like to have a beer with the candidate, etc.
It’s still a cost benefit analysis, but a technology equivalent to the GAO or arguably the FDA could provide significant value.
I'm surprised that you'd use 50% as the threshold. I would use 0%.
There are plenty of government agencies and functions that I trust even though my affiliated party is never in control.
Does the US not have some kind of similar element?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-ministerial_government_dep...
Not on such a widespread basis, no (exceptions exist). For example, Wikipedia lists the Crown Prosecution Service as one such UK government department, but in the US the Attorney General directly governs the Department of Justice. This led to the then-chronic debate about just who had the authority to oversee/direct the Mueller investigation.
Even when an organization is set up outside the traditional Cabinet hierarchy, its leadership is still typically appointed by the President (often with Senate confirmation), such that a new administration should quickly expect to appoint a working majority of directors.
This can also directly cause problems of governance. The Federal Election Commission (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Election_Commission) is an independent agency that is responsible for administering elections law, but because of Presidental/Senate deadlock the board no longer has a quorum required to take official actions.
Despite their many failings, I actually think this system works pretty well, and I'm always impressed at the reasoning behind supreme court rulings --even those I don't agree with.
This is unfortunate perspective, but I can understand why many would have this view.
As others have stated, for the overwhelming majority of the career Civilian and Military workforce, partisanship is a third rail topic at best.
I've been in government service as a military officer or civilian for about half of my working life and being vocally partisan is just not something that is institutionally tolerated, is actively frowned upon and in certain cases unlawful.
I wonder how we could change that perception.
Maybe we should judge people for their own actions rather than who they once worked for?
so do you worry about the post office not delivering your mail if it's of a political nature, the fire department not showing up to put out a fire at your political parties' headquarters, cops not showing up if you're known to be of "that party" ? do these people all act in a partisan fashion throughout their day jobs ?
As somebody who grew up in the german language area (Central Europe) and dealt with Nazi history and extremism for half his life, I am quite sure that a too strong government without proper division of forces is equally dangerous to a weak government that can be taken over too easily by political movements like Germany was in the late 20s.
The whole history of how the Nazis came into power is really something people should study, because I am convinced similar things could easily happen today in multiple democratic nations.
Power is after all fluid and if you weaken your elected government just enough it will flow somewhere else. And if you are unlucky that somewhere else is even more out of the control of the citizen than a government would be.
1) The three branches of the federal government & the checks / balances system, each with their own sub-divisions (e.g. legislative having the Senate + House)
2) States Rights - whatever powers not dictated by the Constitution to the federal government are guaranteed to the States.
If we had a German civil service system instead of the orcs we're actually afflicted with, that would seem like a reasonable thing to do. When an American with historical sense looks at government regulation, we see Tammany Hall, defense contractors, the Clinton family's net worth (a considerable fortune made entirely from political graft) and guys like former SF Mayor Willie Brown wearing $40,000 suits when his job as Mayor pays him $35k a year: overt graft at the highest levels is as part of the fabric of society as Mom and Apple Pie. Usually reducing regulation is wanted by people who are not plugged into the power structure but would like to get their way.
FWIIW I think the OTA was a pretty good government agency, and though I am pretty right wing, Newt Gingrich was an evil jackass and almost everything he did was horrible for the country. I'm guessing they got the axe because they made the mistake of dabbling in policy rather than sticking with their mission, but it's just a guess. Bob Park would know. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_L._Park
Your comment above is quite rare and I agree we must find a middle ground where we can distrust government but still empower it enough to resolve what is best for the nation. The status quo is not what is best for the nation and we should empower conservatives to think bigger than they have been. Maybe conservatives don’t need to dismantle government like an anarchist. Perhaps they could be augmenting it so it can be conserved and saved from revolution.
An argument can be made that a biased OTA is better than no OTA.
Government is inherently political.
I don't trust a government entity to be "independent" or "non-partisan." The rule of thumb I use is "would I trust this government entity if my respective political party is only in control ~50% of the time?"
Some other folks in the threads already mentioned this, but as one example: the Obama campaign was pretty close to the Facebooks / Googles of the world - meaning that there could be a scenario that this OTA office was staffed fully with ex-Googlers or the like, almost like a lobbying firm would do. On one hand, they're fully qualified and (probably) very knowledgeable; on the other hand, I wouldn't trust that the office would provide a fair assessment into regulating those tech companies.
EDIT: grammar / more precise vocabulary