Since taking office, the President has emphasized the need to use evidence and rigorous evaluation in budget, management, and policy decisions to make government work effectively. This need has only grown in the current fiscal environment. Agencies should demonstrate the use of evidence throughout their Fiscal Year (FY) 2014 budget submissions.…

This testimony discusses the findings from our recent work on fragmentation, overlap, and potential duplication in federally funded programs that support teacher quality. We recently issued a report addressing fragmentation, overlap, and potential duplication in federal programs that outlined opportunities to reduce potential duplication across a…

The Federal Pell Grant Program, which provides need-based grants to millions of college students, is the federal government's largest education expenditure. It consumes over half the Department of Education's annual budget and in 2010-2011 cost taxpayers about $36 billion per year. Although the program started out as a way to provide college…

Education finance has emerged as one of the most pressing public policy issues of the new century. Americans spend more than $500 billion a year on elementary and secondary education, yet neither policy-makers nor practitioners seems to know how to align these resources with student learning goals. In fact, spending increases have outstripped…

This paper presents the activities of the Universal Service Administrative Company (USAC) for 2009. The past year was one of accomplishment for USAC. USAC implemented a host of advances in operations, infrastructure, and outreach in an effort to continue to improve collection and disbursement of the Universal Service Fund (USF) support and to…

The large growth in disability transfer program beneficiaries and expenditures from 1965-1978 has led to public concern over the incentive effects of and the budgetary expenditures for these programs. This paper examines the two strategies of removing individuals from the rolls via administrative review and reducing the generosity of benefits.…

In fiscal year 1995, about 26 million students in about 94,000 schools nationwide were served lunches each day through the National School Lunch Program (NSLP). In response to concerns raised about the amount of food thrown away by students (called plate waste), the General Accounting Office (GAO) surveyed a random sample of cafeteria managers in…

An ACE-sponsored task force investigated the impact of federal social and environmental programs on colleges and universities. Major findings are reviewed and implications discussed, such as: (1) the cost of federal regulation, (2) who pays the costs, (3) the right of higher education to special consideration, and (4) how higher education should…

This report critically reviews past benefit-cost studies of manpower programs and offers an alternative methodology for program evaluation. Because of selective admission criteria and a tendency to attribute all income changes to training, previous studies have had an upward bias in measuring the effectiveness of training. This study evaluates a…

PPBS is a way to improve the methods used in planning, programing, budgeting, and evaluating Federal programs. Careful analysis of proposed expenditures and investments are an explicit part of the PPB system. The process of examining various alternatives in order to assure efficient and effective allocation of resources is known as cost analysis.…

This report provides a blueprint for reorganizing the governing structure of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and suggests new procedures of test development and test administration that will increase the interpretability of the assessment while at the same time making more staff and monetary resources available for research…

This report reviews the literature on cost-benefit analysis of retraining and discusses possible approaches to conducting such an analysis. Exemplary programs in Sweden and the United States are described. Despite the existence of externalities which preclude exact calculation of costs and benefits, the report concludes that retraining is…

A number of criticisms of the National School Lunch Program are substantiated by a structural analysis within the general context of national child nutrition needs. The National School Lunch Program has been criticized principally on the ground of inadequate coverage of child nutrition needs, particularly for poor children. For the year 1968,…

Approximately two-thirds of the U.S. Department of Labor's (DOL's) fiscal year 1995 (FY95) budget of $34.3 billion consists of mandatory spending on income maintenance programs. Of the remaining $10.7 billion financing DOL's other functions, approximately $6.9 billion is allocated to employment training activities and $2.93 billion is allocated…