'Evidence-based government' and the FY 2015 budget
As best I can tell from word searches on the Washington Post
and New York Times websites, my favorite part of the President's budget
did not make the mainstream media's near-exhaustive coverage at all.
The overlooked gem is the discussion of how the budget is seeking both to increase
funding for new program efforts where there is actual good evidence,
based on rigorous research, that they work -- and also to provide more
funding for efforts to use social science research to find out whether
programs work. Together, this approach goes under the moniker
"evidence-based government." This section of the budget reflects what
grew out of a call in instructions to agencies for this year's budget to
include evidence-based initiatives in their submissions to OMB.
So the budget proposes funds for experiments to test the
effectiveness of various potentially promising interventions to keep
people with disabilities in the labor force or to improve the quality of
college education while reducing costs. For some programs where there
already exists evidence of success, the budget recommends funding
increases. The budget also recommends increased funding for so-called
"pay for success" programs in various policy areas, including
interventions designed to reduce costs. (In the contracting area, this
has been called "share-in-savings" contracting, to which the budget has
therefore given a boost.)
However, one thing is sadly missing from the
discussion: examples of programs being cut back because of evidence they
don't work.
There is a certain bipartisan wonk coalition that gets excited about
this. I have blogged in support of this approach. My Republican friend
Robert Shea, who was in charge of performance measurement in the Bush
administration, enthused on his Facebook page that this was "what
playing Moneyball in Government looks like."
But there is also a bipartisan coalition that does not like this. Some
Democrats are worried that if you establish the outrageous criterion
that we should be hesitant about funding programs that don't work,
government will get smaller. Some Republicans are worried about handing
too much influence over policy formation to pointy-headed
professors who do research. There is a huge know-nothing constituency
in Washington that wrongly believes (based on many of the egregious
products that partisan think tanks or paid-for consultants put out)
there is no such thing as genuine scholarly research following accepted
methodological standards. And evidence-based government does not get the
ideological or combative juices of either side flowing.
Evidence can't answer all questions, such as how to deal with a program
that does achieve benefits, but costs a lot per amount of benefit
delivered, or how to deal with programs that benefit different groups
differentially. In politics, there will always be a role for values as
well as evidence. But surely an additional dose of
evidence in political debates would be a good thing for our
decision-making processes.
So I would say that if you are inclined to see problems with
evidence-based government, I ask you to consider the alternatives.
Posted by Steve Kelman on Mar 07, 2014 at 5:18 AM