Attention: You are using an outdated browser, device or you do not have the latest version of JavaScript downloaded and so this website may not work as expected. Please download the latest software or switch device to avoid further issues.
| 24 Feb 2026 | |
| Publications |
The Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation (OPRE) is the research and evaluation arm of the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). It is responsible for generating the evidence that tells Congress, states, and the public which federal programs work — and which don’t. OPRE manages more than $150 million in annual grants and contracts, employs 120 federal staff, and oversees research across nine program areas, including child care, child welfare, Head Start, home visiting, and welfare self-sufficiency.
No. OPRE has served administrations of both parties for more than 30 years, established in August 1995 and succeeding an earlier office dating to 1991. The office has also been a resource for congressional committees and the research community. OPRE’s research infrastructure reflects a durable bipartisan consensus that Congress and the executive branch share an interest in knowing what works. The Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act — which OPRE was tasked with implementing at ACF — was signed by President Trump in 2019. The Chief Data Officer role was a Trump-era creation across the federal government, established under the OPEN Government Data Act. Results for America recognized ACF as a leading federal agency for evidence and data use in 2024 as part of its Federal Standard of Excellence.
On February 10, 2026, Assistant Secretary for Family Support Alex Adams issued an internal memorandum — framed as an “Action Memo: FY26 Resource Allocation for Research Activities” — announcing a major restructuring of OPRE. Staff and research vendors were notified on February 13. The memo directs that within 15 days (by February 25), ACF produce a realignment plan transferring research portfolios to three program offices: the Office of Early Childhood Development (ECD), the Administration on Children, Youth and Families (ACYF), and the Office of Family Assistance (OFA). Chief Data Officer functions are directed to transfer to the Office of Administration (OA). Implementation must begin within 30 days of the memo (no later than March 12, 2026).
The restructuring is expected to significantly reduce OPRE staffing, based on reporting from sources with knowledge of the implementation strategy. The “Adams memo” signals that non-mandated discretionary research is unlikely to continue at meaningful scale; even congressionally mandated research is expected to require direct approval from political appointees going forward.
Notably, OPRE was largely not affected by broader 2025 HHS workforce reductions. The “Adams memo” outlines a distinct, abrupt action — not a continuation of earlier downsizing proposals. Major reorganizations are typically announced in the Federal Register; the last such announcement for OPRE occurred on December 4, 2024, when ACF established its Office of the Chief Data Officer. By framing this as a “resource allocation” and Resource Management Plan revision rather than a reorganization, the memo likely does not trigger Federal Register notice requirements that have historically accompanied major OPRE restructurings.
No. HHS has made no public announcement. The Data Foundation and Results for America learned of this restructuring through confidential submissions to SAFE-Track (Secure Anonymous Federal Evidence, Data and Analysis Tracking), the Data Foundation’s secure platform for reporting changes to the federal evidence ecosystem, as well as through direct engagement with personnel across the executive branch and Congress with first-hand knowledge of the matter. We work carefully to validate claims before acting or reporting, consistent with our methodology for the Evidence Capacity Pulse Report series.
Public awareness has come through reporting by The Imprint, which reviewed the memorandum directly, and a February 13 joint statement from the Data Foundation and Results for America. The Data Foundation filed a request to HHS under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) for the Adams memorandum with the intent to release it publicly once fulfilled.
When the people conducting an evaluation are inside the program being evaluated, objectivity can be compromised or questioned — which also undermines the credibility of otherwise valid and reliable findings. The American Evaluation Association’s Evaluation Roadmap for a More Effective Government specifically highlights this in its recommendations for establishing public sector evaluation capacity.
The ACF Evaluation Policy was originally published in the Federal Register in 2014 and most recently revised in November 2021. It explicitly protects “independence in the design, conduct, and analysis of evaluations” and gives OPRE’s director authority to approve and release findings regardless of what they show. OMB Director Vought wrote in 2020 (M-20-12) that evaluation activities “should be appropriately insulated from political and other undue influences that may affect their objectivity, impartiality, and professional judgement.” A restructuring that shifts evaluation to the program level and conditions mandated research on political appointee approval moves in the opposite direction.
Program offices will hopefully continue to build research and evaluation functions which has been a consistent expectation since enactment of the Evidence Act, but without central support, the quality of evaluation products may decay over time. Program offices are focused on service delivery, managing grantees, coordinating with states, and facilitating compliance with applicable law. Evidence functions consistently take a backseat when they share an organizational home with operational priorities. That is precisely why independent evaluation offices exist: to make evidence-building someone’s full-time job and responsibility.
A concrete example: OPRE supported evaluations of more than 70 home visiting programs under its evidence review process. Only 27 met the evidence criteria. That distinction — between programs that claim to be evidence-based and programs that actually are — is what independent, rigorous evaluation produces. While some may view the gap as a shortcoming, it also reflects a growing body of knowledge about what works, in what context, when, and where. Without continued independent evaluation, that knowledge base stops growing.
The entire ACF research portfolio is implicated, but several areas carry particular weight regardless of how these activities are statutorily authorized:
When states, tribes, or territories seek waivers from federal program rules under Section 1115 of the Social Security Act — covering child welfare, child support, and other mandatory programs — they are required to conduct independent evaluations as a condition of approval. OPRE reviewed those evaluation designs to ensure methodological rigor and the usefulness of results. Under the restructuring, this function would move to program commissioners, who have a programmatic interest in approving waivers. The result is that evaluations of very expensive, mandatory-spending programs would be overseen by the offices that approved them — removing the independent check that ensures taxpayers learn what works.
This is a particularly strong area of congressional concern: it involves mandatory — not discretionary — spending, crosses program lines, and the evaluation requirement was built into welfare reform legislation in the 1990s as an explicit bipartisan accountability mechanism. Notably, oversight of Section 1115 waiver demonstrations was part of OPRE’s original 1995 founding mission, not a later addition.
The Adams memo invokes all nine Gold Standard Science tenets (reproducibility, transparency, and acceptance of negative results) to justify the restructuring. But the ninth tenet, “freedom from conflicts of interest,” is structurally incompatible with program offices evaluating their own programs. The Gold Standard Science EO cannot simultaneously require conflict-free research and authorize program offices to exclusively design, fund, and oversee their own evaluations.
From the Adams memo, February 10, 2026:
"All research activities transferred to program offices must continue to adhere to Gold Standard Science principles, including… (ix) freedom from conflicts of interest."
HHS explicitly cited ACF/OPRE to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) as evidence of Gold Standard Science implementation in its August 2025 compliance report — six months before this restructuring. There is no indication HHS has updated that submission to reflect the restructuring of the office it cited.
No, and the record is unambiguous. The Federal Register notice establishing OPRE on August 9, 1995, explicitly included in OPRE’s founding mission: overseeing and managing Section 1115 welfare waiver demonstrations; managing “major cross-cutting, leading-edge studies”; and providing GPRA coordination. These are precisely the functions the Adams memo indicates are to be removed from OPRE. The activities being stripped were not later expansions of the office — they were written into OPRE’s original charter.
From the Federal Register, August 9, 1995 — OPRE’s founding mission:
"The Office oversees and manages the section 1110 and section 1115 social service research programs, including: priority setting and analysis; processing waivers for welfare reform demonstrations; managing and coordinating major cross-cutting, leading-edge studies and special initiatives…"
If anything, the restructuring moves OPRE away from its 1995 founding mission — which centered on cross-cutting, independent research coordination — and toward a much narrower advisory role that did not exist in the original design.
There is a genuine, longstanding debate in the evaluation field about how to balance research independence with programmatic relevance — and reasonable people disagree about where exactly to draw the line. Program offices do bring deep subject matter knowledge, and evaluations benefit from close engagement with program staff on design and implementation questions. The memo’s argument is not without basis.
The organizational question about who has final authority over study design, findings, and publication is distinct from the collaboration question. OPRE already collaborated closely with program offices and has an established public record to document this; former OPRE Director Naomi Goldstein noted the office has developed research questions with program staff “for decades.” What OPRE provided was an independent check on that collaboration: ensuring findings were published regardless of direction and that study designs met rigorous methodological standards. Embedding researchers inside program offices removes that check without replacing it.
The response from the research and evaluation community has been swift and largely critical, though not uniform. The most direct reaction came from Naomi Goldstein, who led OPRE from 2004 to 2022 under both Republican and Democratic administrations. Goldstein acknowledged that OPRE has always worked closely with program staff — “for decades” — but drew a sharp distinction between collaboration and control: “Program offices typically aim to speak with one voice. But research and evaluation findings are what they are.”
Former Assistant Secretary for ACF Mark Greenberg wrote on LinkedIn: “ACF has a long tradition of commitment to the independence of its research. Since 2012, ACF research has been guided by an ACF Evaluation Policy that, among other things, says that research will be published in a timely way when it is completed and that the decision to publish will be made by the non-political head of OPRE, not by political leadership.”
Emily Putnam-Hornstein, a researcher and professor of social work at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, offered a more measured view, noting that “research priorities are always somewhat political” and that she does not object in principle to research funding being more closely tied to an administration’s programmatic priorities. Her perspective reflects a tension in the field about how much independence is necessary versus how much alignment with program operations is valuable.
Other researchers and former officials who spoke to journalists on record expressed a more diffuse concern: that while the restructuring memo does not explicitly cancel ongoing work, cancellation may follow. They pointed to the administration’s cancellation of OPRE grants focused on child care and early childhood research in 2025 as a signal of direction. Programs where Congress has not mandated research investment — such as the Child Care and Development Fund — are seen as particularly vulnerable.
In a joint statement issued February 13, 2026, Data Foundation President and CEO Nick Hart and Results for America CEO and Co-Founder Michele Jolin called the decision “a devastating blow to children, families, and communities across America,” describing OPRE as “one of the federal government’s strongest and most respected evaluation units.” The statement raises three specific concerns: that ongoing multi-year studies will be abandoned just as they approach completion; that the restructuring raises serious questions about congressional intent given FY 2026 appropriations; and that requiring political appointee approval for even mandated research “compromises the scientific independence that gives evaluation findings their credibility and utility.”
The statement also places the OPRE restructuring in a broader pattern: “This action is part of a troubling pattern of dismantling federal evaluation and evidence-building capacity that the Data Foundation has documented across government throughout 2025.”
A coalition letter transmitted to Secretary Kennedy on February 23, 2026, gathered signatures from more than 130 organizations and 600 individuals — a cross-section that is notable both for its breadth and its specificity. Signatories include former HHS senior executives, former OPRE leaders, and former members of the bipartisan U.S. Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking (Evidence Commission). The letter asks the administration to pause and review the decision rather than implement it on a 30-day timeline without broader consultation.
Examples of the organizational signatories represent several distinct communities, each with a different stake in the outcome:
No. The FY 2026 Joint Explanatory Statement and both the House and Senate Markup Reports supported OPRE’s functions as enacted. Congress did not authorize or direct a reorganization. If OPRE-administered funds are not obligated or are redirected inconsistent with congressional intent, reprogramming notification requirements and impoundment concerns may apply. The appropriating committees have not been notified of any reprogramming.
Key funded activities implicated in the restructuring:
| Funding Stream | FY 2026 Amount | Authority |
|---|---|---|
| Social Services Research and Demonstration (SSRD) | $34.5M | SSA § 1110 |
| Child Welfare Research, Training & Demonstration | $22M | Title IV-B |
| Head Start evaluation | Statutory set-aside | Head Start Act §§ 640, 649 |
| Home Visiting (MIECHV) research & evaluation | 3% set-aside | Statutory formula |
| PREP/SRAE research | Embedded in program funds | SSA §§ 510, 511, 513 |
| Program Direction (ACF administration) | $214M | Annual appropriation |
President Trump signed the Executive Order “Restoring Gold Standard Science” on May 23, 2025. HHS submitted its compliance report to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) on August 22, 2025 — six months before the OPRE restructuring — explicitly citing ACF/OPRE as evidence of implementation across multiple tenets, including reproducibility, transparency, and acceptance of negative findings. HHS also made a forward commitment to OSTP for FY 2026: that ACF would require open-access publication, data sharing plans, and public data archiving across all research grants. That commitment is now undeliverable with the OPRE restructuring. There is no indication OSTP has been informed of the restructuring.
The Data Foundation operates SAFE-Track (Secure Anonymous Federal Evidence, Data and Analysis Tracking), a confidential platform launched in February 2025 to systematically document changes affecting federal evidence and data activities. The platform works alongside our multiple information gathering and processing systems to monitor the capacity and state of federal data and evidence capabilities. Over the past year, SAFE-Track has received submissions from federal employees, contractors, researchers, and others with first-hand knowledge of developments across the evidence ecosystem. We work carefully to validate claims before acting, or, at times, reporting — distinguishing between temporary operational disruptions and substantive, durable reductions in capacity.
In this case, the Data Foundation and Results for America learned of the OPRE restructuring through multiple confidential submissions, corroborated by direct engagement with individuals across the executive branch and Congress with first-hand knowledge. We have reviewed and analyzed the memo, including its implementation effects. The restructuring became appropriate to report publicly at the moment HHS staff and vendors were notified, at which point it was no longer an internal deliberative matter but an operational announcement.
The Data Foundation has filed a FOIA request for the Adams memo and will release it publicly as provided once the request is fulfilled. The Imprint reported on this issue after independently reviewing the memorandum.
