According to GAO Report, Agencies Must Effectively Implement Evidence Act

According to a July 2021 report titled Evidence Based Policymaking: Survey Data Identify Opportunities to Strengthen Capacity across Federal Agencies released by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), federal managers identified a wide range of weaknesses in their ability to build and use different types of evidence.

The passage of the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act in 2018 instructed federal agencies to analyze hard data in policy decisions like determining which programs did and did not deserve more funding.  Despite both the Trump and Biden administrations issuing guidance based on the law, GAO found that several weaknesses still exist in the ability of agencies to make data driven decisions.

GAO surveyed 4,000 managers from 24 different agencies from July to December 2020 to prepare this report. GAO used the Office of Management and Budget (OMB)’s definition of “evidence” for this research, which defines the term as “performance information, program evaluations and other types of data, research and analysis.”

According to the report, “nearly all managers (an estimated 95 percent) reported having at least one type of evidence for their programs.” Furthermore, 71 percent of respondents reported using two or more types of evidence to evaluate their programs, and 35 percent used all three types noted above. About half to two thirds of respondents claimed that when they had evidence, it was used in the decision-making process.

Fully implementing the Evidence Act requires people who “understand what conclusions can and cannot be drawn” from evidence, according to the report. The GAO found that “between 50 percent and 60 percent of managers reported that their programs had staff with skills needed to collect, analyze and use different types of evidence,” and 45 percent to 47 percent “reported that their agencies had staff with these skills.”

Managers also reported difficulty in showing the public how a certain program was performing. Only one-third of managers reported using evidence to inform the public about a program’s performance. 

GAO recommends OMB work with the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and relevant interagency councils to leverage the results of this survey as an additional source of information when working to improve evidence-building capacity across the federal government and at individual agencies. Relevant interagency councils may include the Chief Data Officers Council, the Evaluation Officers Council, and the Performance Improvement Council. The Recommendation for Executive Action in the report states that “Results could also be used to help identify cross-cutting capacity issues affecting multiple agencies, and prioritize actions to address them.”