Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

P.L. 115-435 is a challenge from Congress. If embraced, it could have far-reaching implications for science and technology programs, policies, and investments. Enacted in early 2019, this new legislation requires that federal government agencies develop annual plans “for identifying and addressing policy questions relevant to [their] programs, policies, and regulations” and designate a Chief Evaluation Officer to oversee the development and execution of those plans. Submitted to the Office of Management and Budget, these plans will serve as the foundation for developing and implementing “government-wide evaluation activities and policies.” This is not the first attempt at coordinating programming or evaluation of federal science and technology programs, but it is an ambitious piece of legislation that mandates the creation of institutional structures to oversee its execution. In so doing, it may have far-reaching implications for monitoring progress, evaluating impacts, and conducting research on federal government investments in science and technology. The General Accountability Office has found that such programming is generally not coordinated and often overlaps across agencies, and that agencies do not benefit from one another’s efforts in data collection or evaluation, even though similar programs exist that could likely benefit from one another’s evaluation efforts. There have been efforts to foster coordination; the Committee on Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math Education (CoSTEM), established in 2011 to coordinate relevant federal programs, is a recent example. The new legislation gives renewed impetus to such efforts and creates a structure and a mandate for concrete action, including data sharing. The devil is in the details. This presentation will focus on some of those details in three key ways. First, it will highlight the scope of the challenge the legislation presents, such as the breadth of the science and technology portfolio across government agencies. Next, it will summarize what we know about current efforts to monitor and evaluate that portfolio. Finally, the presentation will provide concrete examples of opportunities and barriers encountered when collecting data and conducting evaluations of science and technology programs. Above all, this presentation will underscore key challenges to expect (and address) in responding to this legislation as well as promising opportunities to leverage coordination and information sharing to improve the value of federal dollars invested in science and technology.