August 6, 2010: In an August 2nd blog post, Acting OMB Director Jeffrey Zients makes the case for conducting rigorous evaluations to determine the efficiency and effectiveness of federal programs and for taking action based on evaluation findings. Zients points out that the federal government should verify that taxpayer dollars are being spent on programs that do, in fact, work. He adds that while rigorous evaluations are expensive, the amount of money at risk of being spent ineffectively and inefficiently is much larger, warranting the expense.
OMB issued evaluation guidance for federal agencies on July 30th and announced that some funding has been allocated for a voluntary evaluation initiative to incentivize agencies to evaluate their programs. The evaluation initiative will focus on impact evaluations in particular.
As a proponent of using data to inform decision-making, SHADAC welcomes this message. We consistently encourage states to include evaluation in their funding proposals. SHADAC currently has a contract with the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) at Health and Human Services (HHS) to provide data and evaluation technical assistance to states that have received State Health Access Program (SHAP) grants. In addition, we offer free technical assistance to all states on data and evaluation through funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Read the blog at www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/08/02/discovering-what-works.