Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Panel: Federal Interagency Collaboration to Build Evidence: Lessons and Opportunities

(Methods and Tools of Analysis)

An effective and efficient Federal government requires evidence – evidence about where needs are greatest, what works and what does not work, where and how programs could be improved, and evidence about how programs of yesterday may no longer be suited for today or prepare us for tomorrow.  In its recommendations, the Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking articulated a vision for strengthening Federal evidence-building capacity. In describing this vision, the Commission noted the missed opportunities for evidence building that frequently occur due to challenges working across Federal agencies, as well as the unnecessary burden and cost from duplicative data collections. Further, limitations in data sharing mean that even when an agency recognizes the value of another agency’s data, they may not be able to access it to answer questions about their own programs and populations. As the Federal government continues to strengthen its capacity to build evidence, collaboration and coordination among agencies to produce evidence will be essential.

 

Federal interagency collaboration on evidence-building activities can be challenging, and requires commitment from all participating agencies. Yet, across the Federal government, there are many examples of agencies working together successfully on a range of evidence-building activities, including  evaluating interventions or populations of mutual interest, leveraging data from other agencies to answer questions of internal interest, and providing staffing expertise to help without that capacity  build evidence.

 

This panel will highlight three exemplars of how Federal agencies are working together to build evidence about their programs and populations served. These sessions will not focus on the findings from the evidence-building activities. Rather, each of these examples provides a unique perspective in how interagency collaboration works in practice. The session will begin with a discussion of how the Departments of Labor and Health and Human Services collaborated on parallel studies of subsidized and transitional employment for low-income populations, including shared data collection instruments and common reports. Next, the Administration for Children and Families will discuss its collaboration with the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) to use data from HUD’s Family Options Study to produce a series of research briefs that focus on the well-being and economic self-sufficiency of families and children experiencing homelessness. Finally, the Office of Evaluation Services at the General Services Administration will discuss their work with the Defense Health Agency and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to build evidence on the opioid crisis. Tying these presentations together will be Erica Zielewski, a member of the Office of Management and Budget’s Evidence Team, who will provide a cross-agency perspective on building evidence in the Federal government.

 

Together, these presentations and subsequent discussion will provide attendees with concrete examples of successful Federal interagency collaboration to build evidence. The panel will demonstrate that there is no single model of how Federal agencies can or should coordinate evidence efforts. Importantly, the most effective collaborations are those that find areas of common interest, balance agencies’ individual needs, and offer mutually-beneficial learning.