Wasting Invaluable Public Resources to Save Pennies

Federal policy researchers and evaluators play a small but essential role in every area of government work. These social scientists and scholars work within federal agencies and in the adjacent evaluation industry to run experiments, share data, and measure the impacts of government policies. Their research improves programs that, for example, reduce recidivism, help students graduate community college, and help young adults find jobs.

“Unlike those of us in the policy world, most Americans do not spend much time thinking about statistical methodologies, impact analyses, and evidence standards. And they shouldn’t have to,” writes Stephen Nuñez, Roosevelt’s director of stratification economics, in a new blog post. “Evaluators help make the government work better so that people can worry about other things. However, everyone should care about and take notice of what is now happening in the federal offices that oversee such work.”

Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has taken a (more-or-less literal) chainsaw to government agencies, leading to canceled contracts and mass layoffs of evaluators. Without access to that dedicated workforce and assessment capacity, agencies will be blind to the impacts of their activities moving forward—a recipe for ineffectiveness and waste, contrary to DOGE’s supposed efficiency agenda.

The key takeaway, according to Nuñez: DOGE is “destroying decades of institutional knowledge and expertise in exchange for the equivalent of the coins you might find between couch cushions.”

Read the blog post: “The Irreparable Damage Being Done to Federal Policy Research and Evaluation”

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