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| 17 Jun 2026 | |
| Blogs |
By Nick Hart, CEO, Data Coalition
Every year, the federal government spends trillions of dollars on programs meant to improve lives. It spends remarkably little figuring out whether they work — and even less making sure those findings reach anyone who can act on them. That needs to change.
The federal government has been doing serious program evaluation, imperfectly but deliberately, since the Johnson administration. Agencies like HHS, Labor, Education, HUD and SSA have a long track record of large-scale experiments to identify what works in major social programs. Congress expanded that tradition in 2018 with the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act — signed by President Trump in his first term — establishing government-wide evaluation requirements for the first time.
That history matters. So does an honest accounting of where things stand today.
What we got wrong — and what it cost us
The current moment has exposed three design failures that were always present in our national evaluation infrastructure.
