Improving Results: Setting Goals and Tracking Performance

3.5.1
Improving Performance and Accountability

The Administration is executing the Management Agenda through CAP goals, which are focused on improving coordination across multiple agencies to address key performance improvement priorities. The CAP goals are part of the performance improvement framework developed with the Congress through the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) and the GPRA Modernization Act. Performance for each CAP goal is regularly tracked throughout the year and goal teams are held accountable for results, publishing quarterly updates on Performance.gov. While impressive progress has been seen on CAP goal priorities, overall performance delivery across agency boundaries remains a challenge, and in many cases significant management improvements require investments that cut across agencies and budget accounts. The Budget proposes authority for the OMB Director, with prior notification to the Congress, to transfer up to $15 million to support these crosscutting management initiatives. This proposal institutionalizes a capability to fund cross-agency efforts, rather than handling the challenges on a case-by-case basis. More details about the Federal Government’s specific performance framework can be found on Performance. gov and in the Analytical Perspectives volume of the Budget. The Government can and should be more effective and efficient, and this proposal will provide a powerful tool to turn management reform ideas into real and lasting results for the American people.

3.5.2
Using Evidence and Evaluation to Drive Innovation and Outcomes

There is growing momentum for evidence-based approaches at all levels of government. The Administration’s embrace of evidence-based approaches has resulted in important gains in areas ranging from reducing veterans’ homelessness, to improving educational outcomes, to improving the effectiveness of international development programs. The Budget proposes to take additional evidence-based approaches to scale: for example, providing unemployed workers with reemployment services that have been shown to speed job placement; serving substantially more public housing residents through HUD’s Jobs Plus program, which has been shown to boost earnings; and making major investments in high quality early education and quality child care, which have been shown to significantly improve children’s outcomes. In addition, Members of Congress from both parties, visionary governors and State legislatures, action-oriented mayors, and the non-profit and research communities are promoting greater use of data and research in policymaking and program management.

To enable future administrations and the Congress — as well as State and local leaders — to drive even more resources to policies backed by strong evidence, the Budget proposes a series of legislative changes and investments to accelerate learning about what programs work and why.

Improving Access to Administrative Data. One major focus of the Budget is increasing availability of data that the Government already collects through administering programs — also known as “administrative data” — to answer important questions about the effectiveness of Federal programs and policies. Through the Administration’s Open Data Initiative and recent efforts to increase the use of administrative data for statistical purposes, Federal agencies have made notable progress. However, significant challenges remain, including the need to update both the legal framework around data access and many agencies’ data infrastructure.

The Budget addresses these challenges through a series of initiatives. First, it proposes immediate action to improve access to Federal data sets, most notably national Unemployment Insurance (UI) earnings data, while adhering to a robust framework of privacy, confidentiality, and security protections. Among other benefits, expanding access to UI data will make it possible to create consistent employment outcome “scorecards” for federally-subsidized job training providers, a goal of both the Administration’s job training review and the bipartisan Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act. Earnings data can also be used to rigorously evaluate the effects of other program changes and interventions on employment, wages, and upward mobility. Another Budget proposal would expand statistical agency access to business tax data, improving the quality and consistency of economic statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau (Census), the Bureau of Economic Analysis, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Second, the Budget makes data infrastructure investments at Census, the Department of Education, and elsewhere. These investments will allow the Federal Government to measure outcomes and test new approaches more easily and cheaply across a range of Federal programs. For example, the Census investments would help Census work with States to obtain access to data from State-administered programs, such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) or the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), allowing new analysis of how these programs are used and their effects; Census would also improve its infrastructure for linking data sets together. Finally, the Budget embraces a proposal by Representative Paul Ryan and Senator Patty Murray to establish a Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking, which will advise the Congress on additional ways to improve access to data, while protecting privacy.

Coupling Flexibility with Accountability to Learn What Works. The Budget expands the use of innovative, outcome-focused grant designs that focus Federal dollars on effective practices while also encouraging innovation in service delivery. As discussed in the Investing in America’s Future chapter, a new initiative, the Upward Mobility Project, will allow up to 10 communities, States, or consortia of States and communities to combine funds from up to four block grant programs currently designed to promote opportunity and economic development. Upward Mobility Projects would test and validate promising and evidence-based approaches to help families become more self-sufficient, improve children’s outcomes, and revitalize communities so they can provide more opportunities for their residents. The Budget provides $1.5 billion in additional competitive funding over five years to help support Upward Mobility Projects. This initiative builds on prior Administration evidence building and place-based efforts by coupling greater flexibility in a discrete set of grant programs with requirements to utilize evidence-based strategies or rigorously test innovative approaches to evaluate their effectiveness.

Consistent with the focus on linking flexibility and accountability, the Budget would also authorize up to 10 new Performance Partnership Pilots for Disconnected Youth. Building on provisions included in 2014 and 2015 appropriations bills, this would create a third round of pilots letting States, localities, and Tribes blend funding and receive waivers under multiple youth-serving programs in order to build evidence about more effective ways to help vulnerable youth.

Doubling Down on Evidence-Building Efforts. The Budget also doubles down on Administration evidence efforts that are starting to produce results, such as “tiered evidence” competitive grant programs. Tiered evidence programs focus resources on practices with strong evidence, promote innovation by providing smaller grants to test new, promising ideas, and build evidence on both existing and new practices. The Budget provides significant funding for tiered evidence programs and other efforts that seek to expand our evidence base in important areas. Examples of these efforts include:

• Innovating to Improve Education Outcomes. The Budget invests $300 million for the Investing in Innovation Fund (i3), more than double the 2015 investment, to provide better information to States and school districts on what works in key K-12 education areas such as implementing college- and career-ready standards, improving low-performing schools, and improving the performance of students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). The Budget also triples funding to $200 million for First in the World, which focuses on building the evidence base in higher education, with particular emphasis on college completion.
• Energy Assistance Innovation Fund. The Budget requests $200 million for a Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program Innovation Fund to support State and utility partnerships that test innovative strategies for serving low-income beneficiaries. The competitive funds may include strategies related to reducing energy burden, supporting more efficient and clean energy sources, and improving households’ ability to pay utility costs.
• Using Data and Evidence to Reduce Global Poverty. The Budget provides $1.25 billion over two years for the Millennium Challenge Corporation, which uses competition, evidence-based interventions, and evaluation to target international aid funding to where it can have the largest impact.
• Building Evidence to Inform Conservation Programs. The Budget includes $10 million over two years to build evidence on the incremental effect incentive payments and outreach efforts have on farmers’ willingness to adopt conservation practices and to leverage data and evidence to improve the efficiency of private lands conservation programs.
• Supporting Federal Employees with Innovative Ideas. At the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the “Idea Lab” provides the support, resources and recognition for agency employees with promising new ideas for improving agency functions to pilot and develop their proposals. Funding in the Budget would enable the Departments of Commerce, Education, the Treasury, GSA, and the Small Business Administration (SBA) to create their own versions of an Idea Lab to drive the development of a culture of innovation that yields results.

The Budget also continues support for State and local Pay for Success initiatives, where philanthropic and private investors provide up-front financing for effective preventive services, and Government pays only if and when results are achieved. The Budget reproposes a $300 million Pay for Success Incentive Fund at the Department of the Treasury, similar to bipartisan legislation introduced in the House and Senate last year. It will encourage innovation and accelerate the use of evidence-based approaches by lowering and sharing the risk associated with initial private investments and by enabling State and local governments to attract additional investment in services that result in Federal, State, and local government savings. The Budget also proposes to allocate up to $64 million of appropriations for the Departments of Education and Justice and the Corporation for National and Community Service to support their Pay for Success projects.

Increasing Federal Evaluation Capacity. The Budget proposes significant increases in evaluation capacity to support key priorities. The Budget’s major investments in preschool and child care are accompanied by more than $60 million for early childhood research and evaluation at HHS, the creation of a new National Education Research and Development Center for early education, and the launch of a new round of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study focused on birth to kindergarten entry, both at the Department of Education. These investments will yield crucial information on children’s early life experiences and help determine which models and practices are most effective at improving child outcomes. In addition, the Administration’s Native youth initiative, “Generation Indigenous,” environmental conservation initiatives, child support reforms, and health proposals are paired with investments in high-quality evaluation. The Budget also reproposes $400 million for the Social Security Administration, in partnership with other Federal agencies, to test innovative strategies to help people with disabilities remain in the workforce. Building on an initial $35 million provided for this purpose in 2015, this proposal will help build the evidence base for future program improvements.

The Budget also supports the expansion of the White House Social and Behavioral Sciences Team (SBST), which is coordinated by the Office of Science and Technology Policy and based at GSA. SBST is already helping over a dozen Federal agencies test the impact of behaviorally-informed interventions on program impact and efficiency using rapid, rigorous, and low-cost randomized control trials. For example, SBST helped the Department of Education to test alternative approaches to informing student loan borrowers about their repayment options. This expansion will allow the team to recruit additional experts and expand services to more agencies. Also, to improve the quality of Federal evaluations and reduce waste from inefficient procurement processes, the Budget provides expanded legislative flexibilities for certain agencies to spend funds over longer periods of time for evaluations and surveys. These flexibilities will allow agencies to better target funds to reflect changing circumstances on the ground.

You’ve just read Chapter 3.5:
Improving Results: Setting Goals and Tracking Performance

Read next Chapter 3.6:
Reorganizing Government: Reforming the Government to Win in the Global Economy