Specialist advisory committees serve an important role in the investigation of contentious issues with involved technical components. There are important issues with real and political motivations for investigation and intervention which require a depth of technical understanding that is not easily attained. Society does not typically and cannot reasonably expect representatives to be experts in all fields that require state involvement. Therefore government appoints expert committees to advise on these matters.
There are a variety of stakeholders to consider in the construction of a committee and the execution of its duties. Representatives select the committee members to provide insight or represent particular points of view. The committee members deliberate on the question, with expectations from their personal constituencies, the public, and the appointing parties, and ultimately produce a report for the consumption of the appointers and potentially the public.
The parties selecting committee members have multiple considerations. The direct and obvious goal is to gain expert guidance on a complex issue. Additionally, they may wish to encourage thoughtful discussion of an issue with an eye towards reaching consensus which cannot be achieved in bodies with others goals, such as the contentious floor of congress, the limited scope of courts, or the executive branch. They may wish to provide objective or non-partisan information on which to base their opinions, or, less charitably, they may wish to provide another voice on the side of the issue which they have already selected.
Committee members themselves have competing goals in terms of their participation in the committee. Committee members are convened to deliberate on complex and controversial issues in a reasoned fashion. The ostensible goal of these committees is to construct a position with which most members can agree. Committee members also have obligations to or goals within the community where they gained the standing which got them appointed. Examples of these goals range from advancing their own standing within the community to an obligation to represent the values and judgments of that community. The final objective is to present some guidance or advice to the agencies that established the committee.
Conflicts arise naturally in these processes. Both the committee appointment and the deliberation process involve compromising different agendas. Committees are typically created to resolve conflicts that have arisen within the body that created them. Individuals supporting the creation of such a committee are taking a risk on the committee serving their interests in the matter. The committee members themselves have to balance the desire to reach consensus with the need to represent their own community interests. Additionally, the committee’s makers notions of what constitutes a useful report may stand in conflict with either achieving consensus or representing the committee member’s community interests.
In the case of the Human Fetal Tissue Transplantation Research Panel, there were a number of issues which created additional hindrances to accomplishing its stated goal. First, the group was given a high contentious issue, with strong disagreement between its members and expected to reach consensus in one meeting. Given that ethical judgments and not factual information were requested this seems an extremely short span of time to resolve disputes. Additionally, the panel chair chosen was not an expert in ethics, the scientific topic, or even non-partisan. He was a Republican with a noted anti-abortion disposition whose main qualification was as a retired judge, an expert in legal matters. The questions asked were additionally problematic in shaping a useful result for policy makers in that they requested ethical judgments instead of policy evaluations.
As a result, at the end of the first meeting, the majority offered a series of brief answers to the questions they were charged with and provided minimal justification for their offered answers. Dissenters of the majority offered lengthy, reasoned dissents, which created a problem. The dissents were better supported and more detailed than the majority opinion, making them potentially more influential. This necessitated further deliberation, and attempts at discussion and consideration, dramatically lengthening the process, and producing a much higher quality product.
Ultimately the recommendations of the committee were not followed. It was released to the public several months after its completion. The recommendations were basically ignored by the decision makers in the executive branch who effectively banned transplantation research less than a year after the report issued recommended guidelines for allowing it. Further, legislative attempts to overturn the executive moratorium in favor of the committee’s recommendations failed. The author seeks to attribute this failure to aspects of the deliberative process, but it seems to have resulted more from the political follow through.