Congress created the bipartisan Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking to “develop a strategy for increasing the availability and use of data in order to build evidence about government programs, while protecting privacy and confidentiality.” The Commission’s final report provides recommendations in three areas: improving researcher access to government data via a National Secure Data Service, modernizing privacy protection for evidence building, and strengthening the capacity for building evidence within the federal government. The Bipartisan Policy Center has taken on the task of moving the recommendations of the Commission toward implementation, which will proceed in three phases. First, recommendations with broad bipartisan support will be introduced in fall 2017. Second, a more complex legislative package will be developed during 2018. Third, additional legislative efforts will advance a broader agenda of evidence-based initiatives in response to the recommendations of the Commission, which may include ways to improve coordination between federal and state entities for sharing data, as well as establishing evidence-based criteria for evaluating and improving current and future programs. Accomplishing these priorities would increase access to data that are essential for building and testing effective responses to inequality, and, in so doing, would represent important steps toward the Foundation’s aim to advance research on reducing inequality in youth outcomes in the United States.
This grant supports the efforts of the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) to foster the implementation of the recommendations of the Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking.
