Press Release

By: AIF Staff

Washington, DC – Earlier this week, American Idea Foundation President Paul Ryan was a featured guest on theHardly Working podcast. The podcast, hosted by Brent Orrell and produced by the American Enterprise Institute (where Ryan is a visiting fellow), focuses on the future of workforce development and on how policymakers can help individuals meet the diverse needs of the 21^st century economy.

During the podcast interview, Speaker Ryan and Orrell discussed using evidence-based solutions to break through partisan gridlock, the amazing accomplishments of the Nurse-Family Partnership program, and other ways to successfully fight poverty.

Listen to the entire interview here or by clicking the icon below. Highlights of the conversation, edited slightly for clarity, follow.

The genesis & aims of the American Idea Foundation:

“After I retired as Speaker of the House, I wanted to focus on some of the things I really cared about which are poverty and strategies to improve our fight against poverty. I wanted to help go after poverty’s root causes and help break the cycle of poverty. There are different kinds of poverty, but I wanted to focus on intergenerational poverty and it’s just a perfect segue to what we are talking about which is the last law I wrote in Congress. It’s this thing called the Evidence Act.

“It’s a bill that I did with Senator Patty Murray. We founded this [Evidence-Based Policymaking] Commission and we got the idea from Jim Sullivan at Notre Dame, economists at their Laboratory for Economic Opportunities, and Raj Chetty, an economist at Harvard…. We put Ron Haskins from the Brookings Institution in charge of it because I wanted to make sure this was not seen as some Republican thing, but rather just a good thing. The Commission gave us its results, we took them and put them in a bill and got it through Congress….

“Now, academic researchers can look at the data and see what works and what doesn’t and then get the government to actually measure the results of programs, the effectiveness of programs, and whether something works or not.  [It helps] get the muscle memory built in the minds not just of the bureaucracy, but of policymakers and of philanthropy to focus on evidence-based policymaking, so that we can bypass the ideological loggerheads….

“So, my foundation is basically focused on what I would call center-right ideas for fighting poverty and restoring civil society and reproducing upper mobility that we aspire to as Americans. It’s called the American Idea Foundation and I’d say the “American Idea,” or at least what we think of, is that the condition of your birth should not determine the outcome of your life.

“America is the only country founded on natural rights. It’s a beautiful thing. We are the only country that’s founded on an idea and it’s the job of Americans to pass this on to every generation.

“My foundation is trying to do that by making sure that we’re [using] evidence as a policy-making barometer and as a tool in government and out of government. Then [we’re trying to support] those things that connect the private sector, the public sector, and the philanthropic sector to get capital into poor communities, to get the private sector into poor communities.”

An evidence-based success story: The Nurse-Family Partnership program

“I’ve been to the Nurse-Family Partnership programs in Kenosha and Racine and I was just down in rural South Carolina last month touring [their program]…. The Nurse-Family Partnership is where a nurse partners with an expectant mom and they become very close. They become friends and the nurse effectively acts like a mother or a mentor – that’s probably a better word, a mentor to the expectant mother to help her figure out what you have to do to have a healthy pregnancy. The nurse says these are the vitamins, this the diet, these are the things you don’t do, these are the things you do, and here’s how you get prepared. No one else would tell [these mothers] this and then after they’ve had the baby, they help them for [two] years… with all those other things in infancy and it has huge impacts on a child’s development.

“The program has been subjected to randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and we’ve been running evidence and analytics on this program for years. I first got involved with it in the George W. Bush Administration which grew the program. President Obama was enamored with it and they expanded it and then President Trump saw it and he reauthorized it. So, it grew under Bush, Obama, and Trump, three very different Presidents.

“It’s a program that just has really good evidence that proved [its concept]. It’s teaching women who are having babies…. how to be good moms and how to raise those kids and how to do so at a really critical stage of development from pre-birth to three years old.

“It’s extremely successful. Those nurses and those moms become extremely close, and they help these moms really ratchet themselves up the ladder of life, up the escalator of upward mobility, and get them on a really good path, putting their life together so the mother is better off. And if she’s going to be better off, we all know and it’s really clear that her child is going to be better off.

“This is an example of a government program and of civil society working to actually alter people’s trajectory and change society for the better…. For moms who’ve never had a baby and who didn’t know how to raise a baby, there is a good program that actually works. And if we prove that it works, then let’s fund it and let’s take the money from the programs that have been proven not to work and use that so we don’t actually net increase spending.”

Focusing on outcomes, not dollars spent, to better fight poverty:

“For lack of a better phrase, the War on Poverty got gripped by an ideology and because of that ideology, we started to measure success by throwing money at problems. We measured success by inputs like money or creating new programs.

“In many ways, they created this notion of “just let the government do it” if we’re trying to fight poverty and trying to get people out of poverty. [It was a notion of] don’t worry, pay your taxes, the government has got this figured out. [The government] will create programs to deal with this, as if that is a perfectly decent substitute for communities, for mediating institutions, for people helping fix problems person to person or community to community. They decided big is better. [They decided] the federal government is more efficient and they can just design programs and therefore materialistically [the government] can solve this problem.

“It blew up in our faces. It created a lot of dependency and it backfired. Materially taking people out of poverty, from a technical perspective by throwing money at the problem – sure, you can do that — but have we really created a society enriched with upward mobility, with people living the best versions of their lives and becoming the best versions of themselves? Did these policies do that? No.

“I think what is missing is the sense of community, the sense of solidarity, the mediating institutions that civil society provides. We displaced people participating in helping the lives of one another…. You can’t just substitute [government] for the private sector and for economic growth, wage growth, competition for labor, innovation, opportunity, social capital and all that comes with it.

“I think we went down this path in the War on Poverty of just getting rid of the secret sauce that makes all this stuff work and substituting all of it for more programs, more money, more dependency and [we’ve seen] predictable results.”

Strengthening civil society in an era of digitization and polarization:

“We are in real trouble right now because of digitization. I think we are living more artificial lives on our electronic devices and it is actually bringing atrophy to these mediating institutions — our churches, our civic organizations, the place and space where we live our lives, the space between our government and ourselves.

“And there’s also capital. Obviously, you have to have investment. You have to have organizations that promote civil society and all these things that help people realize their humanity and that work with one another to do that….

“The best thing I can come up with is we have to revitalize those institutions and revitalize civil society. We have to revitalize those non-government organizations and, since we’re becoming less religious as well, it is these non-government organizations that connect us and give us a sense of value and pride in helping other people. They give us this common good sense of community. If you’re raising kids — and I’ve got two that still have to get through high school, you’re really involved in this stuff but once you’re done with that, everybody leaves and that’s what’s sort of happening in society today.

“I wish I could say there’s a government program or a bill with the capacity to fix this but there really isn’t a way other than to have a good, healthy, growing economy so people have discretionary income, so they have more hours at home, working on these parts of their community.”

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By: AIF Staff

Washington, DC – This weekend, American Idea Foundation President and former Speaker Paul Ryan talked with Government Matters‘ Mimi Geerges about his work in Congress to fight poverty and expand economic opportunities. In the interview, Speaker Ryan discussed how the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act is currently being utilized by federal agencies to modernize data collection, analysis, security, and dissemination practices.

The implementation of this legislation, which Speaker Ryan sponsored with Senator Patty Murray of Washington, was the subject of Speaker Ryan’s remarks at the 2021 GovDATAx conference. At its core, the legislation is designed to improve the federal government’s use of data, evidence, and analytics so it can allocate funds more effectively and achieve meaningful results through social safety net programs.

Ryan’s interview with Government Matters is available here or by clicking the icon below. Some notable excerpts, edited slightly for clarity, follow.

How Ryan got involved and why he stayed involved in policy discussions about fighting poverty:

“I’ve always had just a big desire to focus on [fighting poverty]. I spent a lot of my time in Congress on these issues and I was just raised with this gorgeous notion of the American Idea, or what I call the American Idea, which is the condition of your birth should not determine the outcome of your life in a free society such as ours. Everybody has the right to rise, but also we should nurture people’s ability to rise and make the most of their life.”

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“When I left Congress, I wanted to still work on some of the ideas that I’m passionate about. I was a policymaker for 20 years in Congress. I left Congress but I didn’t leave my love of public policy, so I decided to start the American Idea Foundation so I could continue to focus on these issues – in particular, fighting poverty, that are very important to me…. I spent years on this first when I was Chairman of the Budget Committee and then when I was Ways and Means Chair. We were coming up on the 50th anniversary of the War on Poverty. We had spent $15 trillion yet we hadn’t moved the needle nearly as much as we should have. And so, I spent a lot of my time figuring out what went wrong, what are the lessons, what are the takeaways, and one of the things, using my economic-thinking hat, that I took away was we weren’t measuring things the right way. We measured government’s success in fighting poverty based on effort and inputs. [We measured success by] how much money are we spending, how many programs are we creating versus measuring success on a set of results and outcomes. Where are we really getting people out of poverty? Where are people breaking the cycle of poverty where we deal with the tough issue of multi-generational poverty?

“That is where I got very interested in this issue which spawned me to create the Evidence Commission and then to write the Evidence-Based Policymaking Act to try to move the War on Poverty from an input-based and effort-based measurement system to an outcomes-based system where we actually measure our efforts based on results.”

The Nurse-Family Partnership program is a prime example of using evidence to improve outcomes:

“I was in South Carolina with Senator Tim Scott and Congressmen Joe Wilson and Ralph Norman in June and we went into rural South Carolina and looked at something called the Nurse-Family Partnership Program, which is authorized by a federal program called MIECHV, the Maternal, Infant and Early Childhood Home Visitation program.

“It is one of the few evidence-based federal programs. What it does is it pairs a nurse with a low-income expectant mother and [the nurse] helps that mother through the prenatal stage up until her child is two years old. They use very rigorous data and reporting for these programs. This program was started by President George W. Bush. It was continued by President Barack Obama and recently reauthorized by President Donald Trump. So, [it expanded during] three different presidential administrations, all because of good data and because it had proven results to show it was working.

“It was not controversial, it was non-partisan. I was involved in each of these Administrations and the results are really clear. A study from 2019 shows that money invested yielded a 6 to 1 benefit to cost ratio. It provides $27,000 in savings per family in the form of reduced public assistance. It improves health outcomes of the mother and of the child. Participants have a higher likelihood of graduating high school and lower incidences of domestic violence.

“In other words, rigorous data is showing that this particular program of intervening and helping young, expectant mothers at the prenatal stage until their child is two years old really makes a difference. And doing these programs with rigorous data makes sure that the programs are done well and done effectively. This is one example of something that I think has worked really well because of data collection and because of evidence and this is the kind of thing that we’re promoting with the American Idea Foundation.”

Why the Evidence Based Policymaking Act was needed:

“It was basically needed because Congress was not evaluating whether what we were doing was working or not. There really wasn’t any process in place to measure the effectiveness and the outcome of our poverty-fighting efforts. The Evidence-Based Policymaking Act was based upon the Evidence Commission that said: “Here’s how you do this, here’s how you can collect data, here’s how you secure data with privacy and cyber protections, and then here’s how you disseminate that so that we can use that and measure whether or not something works or not.” [This way] policymakers can be better informed so that we can tie evidence to funding, so we can go with what works versus what doesn’t work.”

Adopting Best Practices to collect better, more impactful data and evidence:

“I’m a huge believer in what we call Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs). I teach at Notre Dame and I work with Notre Dame’s Laboratory for Economic Opportunity. We run randomized controlled trials, about 75 per year, on poverty programs so you can really measure what works. Using RCTs, using evidence, and then showing policymakers what works and what doesn’t work is, I think, going to really move us so we can be more effective as a federal government, more effective as charities, and more effective as nonprofits.

“And then the other thing I’d say is removing the silos so that data can cross over, so you can cross-connect data so you can learn from it. That’s one of the problems that the federal government has is that we collect data in silos, so break down those silos, allow data-sharing across different data sets, and you can really get some rich, robust research to find out what works and what doesn’t.”

To read the legislative text of the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2018, click here. 

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