Overview

Key Takeaway

Evidence of effectiveness is critical to local governments as they allocate limited resources, are accountable for quality services, and seek program sustainability across administrations.

The CFE Fund submitted a Comment Letter to the US Bureau of the Census Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking. The letter focused on strategies to increase the availability and use of government data to build evidence for programs and policies, while protecting privacy and confidentiality—drawing from the CFE Fund’s experience working with local governments across the country. Evidence of effectiveness is critical to local governments as they allocate limited resources, are accountable to residents for quality services, and seek program sustainability across administration changes. Based on programmatic experience from the Financial Empowerment Center initiative, the CFE Fund offers a number of recommendations to the Commission. These include: encourage federally funded programs, including block grants, to bake evaluation into program design; support data linkage efforts to give evaluators access to administrative data while ensuring privacy; and synchronize federal program data structures so agencies with multiple programs can collect compatible data, ideally in the same database.

Additional Takeaways

Federally funded programs should include evaluation as a core part of program design; an early focus on data can ensure appropriate collection, integrity and sharing of data.

Efforts like the Census Bureau’s Data Linkage Infrastructure can give evaluators access to valuable administrative data.

Federal program data structures should be synchronized to facilitate data collection in agencies with multiple programs.

Related Items