American Idea Foundation

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On “Workforce Realigned” Podcast: Speaker Ryan & Gov. Deval Patrick discuss using Performance-Based Contracting to Improve Outcomes

On “Workforce Realigned” Podcast: Speaker Ryan & Gov. Deval Patrick discuss using Performance-Based Contracting to Improve Outcomes

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Washington, DC – Earlier this spring, American Idea Foundation President Paul Ryan (R-WI) took part in a podcast with former Governor Deval Patrick (D-MA) focused on mobilizing capital to improve the lives of Americans in need.

The “Workforce Realigned” podcast , which was produced by Social Finance and the Federal Reserves of Atlanta, Philadelphia, and San Francisco, is part of a larger initiative promoting outcome-based financing strategies that effectively “Pay for Success” and drawing attention to those initiatives that are demonstrating tangible results for the people they serve.

In connection with the podcast, Social Finance also published a book, available here, containing a series of case studies about how results-based financing can create benefits to the government, employers, service providers, and participants, which ultimately expand economic opportunity.

Speaker Ryan authored a chapter focused specifically on the mixed results of past performance-based programs and on a promising new innovation in this space, Social Impact Bonds. Ryan also touched on a 2018 law, the Social Impact Partnership to Pay for Results Act (SIPPRA), which in his view is an encouraging federal tool to tackle specific challenges like recidivism, homeless, and early childhood development.

Speaker Ryan’s chapter is accessible here: Buying Outcomes: Lessons from the Past and some highlights from the podcast interview with Governor Patrick follow. To listen to the podcast in its entirety, click  here.  

The mixed history of performance-based contracting & reasons for optimism:

“The truth is there’s a pretty long history of performance-based contracting in American civic life and, you know, a lot of it hasn’t really worked all that well. We looked at a few examples over the past 40 years of programs that we were trying to achieve these kinds of goals: linking payments and performance, and frankly, we found that there was a lot of struggle. This is a little harder than it seems it should be.

“There seems to be some repeated issues though, when you dig into this. Many [performance-based contracting programs] don’t do a good job of differentiating between the different risk levels and the people being served so what happens is providers get penalized for serving people with greater needs.

“Program providers basically want to cook the books by picking the best-performing people in their pool so that they can look good and that does not give us the right kind of data that we want to rely on to make sound decisions and create the right kind of goals. Other people were allowed in evaluations that weren’t really trustworthy or they paid for outcomes that didn’t really reflect policy goals. So, I think what we can take away from this and what we’ve learned from this and what the Pay for Success movement has tried to solve is that like very many other tools, you can build performance-based contracts well or you can build them poorly.

“You have to be careful with how you design these things and you’ve got to be mindful of just the typical human errors and the mistakes of the past. If you take that into consideration, then I really believe you can build a really good Pay-for-Performance model and then we can get evidence and we can get outcomes. Then, we can use those to scale and replicate [solutions] and really move the needle on poverty.”

Developing an Evidence-Based Clearinghouse to spread awareness about successful solutions:

“One initiative that I’m really excited about is a project we are launching at the American idea Foundation, which is the non-profit foundation that I started, and that is the Evidence-Based Clearinghouse.

“What you have is all these disparate efforts around the country that are engaged in evidence-based policymaking and are using data and analytics and randomized controlled trials to figure out what works, what doesn’t, and to find evidence on how best to fight poverty. The problem is there is so much evidence and data out there and it’s in all these disparate places. It’s in various universities, in various think tanks, in various non-profit centers.

“And so, what the American Idea foundation is going to do is create a clearinghouse for all of the evidence-based policy on poverty programs so that you have a one-stop shop. So, if you’re sitting in Spokane, Washington, or Houston, Texas, or Janesville, Wisconsin, or Brooklyn, New York, and you want to design a program to solve some problem related to juvenile justice, recidivism, homelessness, addiction, or job training, you go to the American idea Foundation’s Clearinghouse on Evidence Based Policy and you find out what’s been done, what trial and error has already occurred, how you learn from the mistakes that other people made so that you don’t repeat those mistakes, and [how you] can build a successful poverty fighting effort based upon all the latest available data and science that has been conducted in America so that you can move forward with success.

“In our view, this is how you scale solutions: You measure, you replicate, and you move. And that is what the American idea Foundation’s Data Clearinghouse on Evidence-Based Policymaking is going to do. It’s never been done before. It’s one of its kind, and I’m really excited about the impact it’s going to have on fighting poverty.”

SIPPRA can bridge partisan divides and improve outcomes for people in need:

“The federal government has sort of dipped their toe in the water here a little bit. It has sporadically supported Pay for Success projects. I can think of projects at the Department of Labor, Justice, HUD, and I think even USAID. I think they all have dipped their toes in this space in the last five years. But in 2018, we started to try to chart a more unified approach towards strengthening this tool and as part of one of the bills I passed back in that year, Congress passed the Social Impact Partnerships to Pay for Results Act that we call “SIPPRA.”

“It has a $100 million fund, administered by the Treasury Department, to support state and local pay-for-success projects. This was a huge part of a bipartisan bill and it turns out there is a constituency for making government smarter or more effective. Republicans and Democrats agree on this!

“The idea behind SIPPRA is to get more states and counties to experiment with outcome-based funding. If they develop projects with strong, evidence-based interventions that are evaluated properly and evaluated well, then the federal government will do its fair share, paying for part of the social outcomes achieved and for part of the cost of evaluation. I’m really excited and I think we’re turning the corner. We’re getting better at this.”

Removing partisanship from poverty-fighting, focusing on evidence and outcomes:

“I’m hopeful that the Biden Administration will focus on this and get this right….so that we truly are using SIPPRA as a tool to leverage local Pay for Success programs. We’ve learned from trial and error in the past. We’ve got lots of takeaways about how to build these things successfully now. We know how to build pay-for-success models and I really believe that this law will be the seed corn that can grow and germinate into replicating pay-for-success programs across the country, at all levels of government, and in the private sector.

“Frankly, I think we’re on the cusp of something new and big which is to move towards evidence-based, outcome-based policymaking and what we will learn is what needs to be scaled and replicated so we can build it out.

“As a person who fought these [partisan fights in Congress], you end up getting into these ideological, partisan battles over how to get people out of poverty and there’s a status quo that wants to keep things the way there are. There are ideologues that want to make these programs and fights political and ideological.

“What Evidence-Based policymaking and pay-for-success does is it bypasses all of that. It leapfrogs the partisanship, the status quo, the ideological battles, and just goes with what works. Are we getting people out of poverty or not? And by getting to that level of debate, I really believe we’re going to move the needle on poverty.

“We’re more or less on the cusp of a new sense of social science and economics, which is evidence-based policymaking and outcome-based policymaking. We shouldn’t measure success based on effort and input; we should measure success based on outcome and results. This can help reduce partisanship and polarization in America and get people of both sides of the aisle — people of goodwill, focusing on the actual objective, which is getting people out of poverty. I’m excited about this work. I’m excited about the outcomes. I’m excited about this phase of this debate and I really think we’re on the cusp of something big here.”

Buying Outcomes: Lessons from the Past

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By: AIF Staff

In 2014, a year that coincided with the 50th Anniversary of the War on Poverty, then-Chairman of the House Budget Committee Paul Ryan conducted a review of the federal government’s poverty-fighting efforts and disappointingly found that federal programs often fail to align dollars spent with outcomes achieved. All too frequently, well-intended federal programs did not meet their stated aims and as a result, communities and participants suffered due to lack-luster performances.  

The 2014 assessment of the federal government’s poverty-fighting efforts revealed a simple truth: For decades, the federal government has attempted to structure large-scale programs in a way that achieves positive employment outcomes and there are lessons, both good and bad, to be learned from these efforts.

The desire to improve the federal government’s poverty-fighting efforts so they better assist more Americans is why Speaker Ryan and the American Idea Foundation participated in a project, led by Social Finance and conducted in partnership with the Federal Reserves of Philadelphia, Atlanta, and San Francisco, to identify incentive models that have demonstrated track records of success.

The result of this project was a book, Workforce Realigned: How New Partnerships are Advancing Economic Mobility, that contains a series of 19 case studies about how results-based financing can create benefits to the government, employers, service providers, and participants. Speaker Ryan’s chapter focused specifically on the mixed results of past performance-based programs and on a promising new innovation in this space, Social Impact Bonds.

Key excerpts from Speaker Ryan’s chapter follows. You can read his chapter in its entirety here.

An Introduction to Performance-Based Contracting

America is at a moment of great need and great opportunity in the fight against poverty. Amid a global pandemic and recession, the importance of disrupting the stale institutions in place to tackle these challenges has become clearer than ever before…

Our efforts have too often originated in Washington D.C. with little input from the individuals on the ground working to expand opportunity and those with lived experience, leading to approaches that further displace and marginalize those living in poverty. It’s when we innovate together to solve this problem–combining the vibrancy of community-based solutions, the know-how of the private sector, and the scale of government policy–that we have the greatest potential to make a difference.

Social impact bonds bring together the best of the public and private sectors to address the most critical issues our country is facing. The goal of a social public good–a world in which far fewer Americans live in poverty–is central to their execution. So too is the expertise and capital of the private sector, which provides the funding, the strategic thinking, and the energy to deploy resources where most needed. When executed properly, programs like these have enormous promise.

Unfortunately, the long history of performance-based contracting in American civic life includes frequent examples of programs that have not achieved their desired results. Over the past four decades, the government has attempted to structure several programs that offer payouts based on provider performance to drive better outcomes. Although these programs have been created with the best intentions, they have driven little improvement to the status quo. Identifying and addressing the challenges they have faced will be critical to designing the next generation of performance-based contracts….

When performance-based contracts are set up well, shortfalls are mitigated and the programs have significant potential to improve lives. Well-executed performance-based contracting offers benefits for all parties involved, by shifting spending risk away from governments, creating positive feedback loops based on provider effectiveness, and facilitating the collection of data on intervention outcomes.

As the next generation of performance-based contracts takes hold–strengthened by groundbreaking federal legislation, such as the Social Impact Partnerships to Pay for Results Act–it is essential that we learn from the challenges that past initiatives have faced. Historical examples from workforce development and health care offer lessons on how to mitigate typical shortcomings and fully unlock the potential of performance-based contracting.

The Job Training Partnership Act (1982)

Going back to the 1980s, federal legislation has tied payments to employment outcomes achieved by program participants…. The Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA) of 1982 was one such program. Developed through a bipartisan effort led by Senators Dan Quayle, Edward Kennedy, Paula Hawkins, and Claiborne Pell and by Representatives Augustus Hawkins and James Jeffords, it was signed into law by then President Reagan. The bill aimed to improve employment rates for low-income Americans by providing budgetary rewards and sanctions to jurisdictions based on the near-term labor market outcome levels achieved by participants.

To carry out its purpose, the JTPA established federal assistance for adult and youth programs, federally administered programs (such as training for migrant workers and veterans), summer youth employment and training programs, and training assistance for workers affected by layoffs.  The program established a performance management system that provided rankings of 620 Service Delivery Areas (SDAs) and set aside funding to reward SDAs that performed particularly well relative to the overall labor market.

To evaluate outcomes, JTPA originally considered four performance measures: rate of entering employment, average wage at placement, cost per participant who entered employment, and rate of entering employment among welfare recipients. However, states were given considerable flexibility to select comparison data and define favorable terms. Where improved results existed, it became clear that they had been driven by the selection of participants who had fewer needs, and, therefore, were easier to serve…. The JTPA was suffering from several common challenges, as identified in an analysis by Burt Barnow & Jeffrey Smith:

  • The program provided stranger incentives to serve less-vulnerable populations: JTPA incentives treated all program participants equally, which led to higher margins for service providers who chose to serve lower-need individuals. The program did not serve groups such as women and people of color in proportion to their share of the eligible population, while individuals who would likely have achieved high post-training earnings regardless of the quality of the training were disproportionately represented. A structure that assigns different levels of value based upon the need of the population might have addressed this challenge.
  • The timing of performance incentives skewed services provided: In some cases, the length of the training programs was influenced by program managers’ desire to count participants in their data for a particular program year. These arbitrary timing changes were found to reduce the overall mean impact of the training services the program provided. Updates to monitoring and reporting systems may limit the extent to which programs are able to manipulate data in this way.
  • There was limited support that incentives improved individual performance: It is unclear that the project improved the individual efficiency of employees in the absence of incentives at the individual employee level. Future performance-based contracts may explore how service providers can pass on incentive payments to their employees and how they can track individual performance without adding significant overhead costs.
  • Some providers gamed the compensation system: There is strong evidence that JTPA service providers developed strategies to earn higher payments by gaming the performance system. A common gaming strategy involved formally enrolling participants in the program only after they had found jobs, and then quickly terminating them, in order to increase the proportion of employed individuals. Adjusting reporting requirements and improving metrics and evaluation systems could help to reduce the extent to which gaming can yield higher payments.

As a result of its structural challenges and the limited improvement to participants’ employment outcomes, the JTPA was repealed in 1998.  The program’s failure to segment target populations, its focus on measurements that were not linked to individual performance, and its lack of safeguards to avoid gaming are valuable reminders of the potential risks of performance-based contracting in workforce development. However, these mistakes also offer lessons regarding critical areas of focus for other pay-for-performance programs to succeed in the future.

Ticket to Work (1999)

In 1999, another performance-based workforce development program emerged that aimed to increase the number of low-income Americans achieving economic self-sufficiency. At the time, only 0.5% of Social Security Disability beneficiaries were leaving the benefit rolls because they secured jobs. Legislators hoped to create a better market to meet the diverse return-to-work service needs of beneficiaries and increase the rate of exiting the program due to work to 1%.

The Ticket to Work (TTW) and Work Improvement Incentives Act of 1999 was designed to support this mission by promoting flexible, customizable services to help disability insurance beneficiaries secure self-supporting jobs. The program incentivized private organizations and state agencies to deliver quality services by providing large payments for each client who secured a job and retained it for long enough to stop receiving Social Security Disability benefits….

Despite the program’s intent to reach a broad group of beneficiaries, its early success was limited: By 2005, only 2% of the individuals who received Tickets in the mail had used them, and only 45% of the 1,300 enrolled employer networks had accepted a Ticket. Like the JTPA, TTW’s outcomes suffered from a range of shortfalls:

  • Providers perceived the system as too financially risky: TTW tied 100% of provider compensation to outcomes, which caused significant uncertainty as to whether payouts would be achieved. Research showed that after the first two years of program operations, employer networks relying on TTW payments as their sole source of revenue would have lost money: The cost of service delivery far exceeded TTW revenues for most providers. Offering upfront operating capital to providers in addition to outcomes-based payments, as many social impact bonds now do, might have helped to mitigate this challenge.
  • The program provided higher payouts to providers serving less-vulnerable populations: Like other unsuccessful performance-based contracts, TTW created selection bias against harder-to-serve individuals and services less likely to lead to quick employment. Providers could refuse to serve individuals who they thought were unlikely to maintain high enough earnings to stop receiving benefits, and, therefore, unlikely to trigger outcome payments. They could also choose to offer only services that aligned with the outcomes payments they were likely to receive. Differentiating payment amounts based on participants’ level of need could have helped to avoid rewarding providers for serving the lowest-need clients.
  • The benefits structure discouraged some beneficiaries from returning to work: The program did nothing to address that participants would lose 100% of their Social Security Disability benefits once their monthly earnings exceeded a certain threshold, which created a significant barrier for returning to work. Structuring the program to scale the reduction of benefits more gradually might have increased the value proposition of returning to the workforce for participants.
  • Reporting and administrative burdens fell on service providers and participants: Finally, there were significant administrative challenges that delayed outcomes measurement and provider repayment. Beneficiaries were expected to submit salary documentation to employer networks but given no incentive to do so, which made it difficult for employer networks to demonstrate that monthly earnings had reached the designated threshold. Establishing data-sharing provisions upfront might have minimized administrative burdens and streamlined the system for triggering repayment….

In response to provider feedback, a set of revisions passed in 2008 that increased the number and total value of provider payments, shortened the period of participant employment for employer networks to receive full payment from 60 to 36 months, and revamped payment procedures to reduce administrative burden. The revised system was significantly more attractive to providers, and the number of employer networks that accepted at least one Ticket doubled from 2007 to 2010.

The increase in participation in TTW following the 2008 legislation reform affirms the importance of seeking service provider input to mitigate unforeseen barriers to entry….

Physician Pay for Performance (2005-2017)

Health care is another area in which performance-based contracting offers both the potential to improve service quality, and the risk of gaming and poorly structured incentives. The United States spends more on doctors, pharmaceuticals, and health administration as a percentage of GDP than any other high-income nation, yet does not enjoy better health outcomes. To combat rising costs and improve quality, states, healthcare systems, insurance companies, and federal agencies have piloted Pay-For-Performance (PFP) programs for physicians and hospitals across the country. The success of these programs, however, has been largely uneven.

In November 2017, researchers from the University of Pittsburgh and Harvard published a study reporting that Medicare PFP programs failed to improve healthcare quality or reduce costs. Rather than promote better outcomes, the program penalized physicians who cared for lower-income and sicker patients because the doctors’ “quality scores,” and, therefore payment, decreased. The program’s structure emphasized health outputs over baseline improvement, creating financial disincentives for doctors to treat patients who were less healthy.

Providing higher payouts to those who serve healthier patients is a key issue in physician PFP programs, in which financial incentives often fail to promote health improvements over specific health outputs. While physician skill is an important component of health quality, factors such as the patient’s baseline health, socio-economic status, access to insurance, and exercise habits all contribute to health outcomes and are largely outside of the doctor’s control. PFP programs that exclusively target physician pay without supporting other interventions draw a direct link from individual clinician skill to patient health that can create financial disincentives to treat the sickest patients….

The lack of success of physician and hospital PFP programs has led many critics to call for an end to PFP in healthcare. However, it’s possible that an outcomes-based funding system could be effective in the absence of this program’s poor project design, weak measurement, incorrect outcome criteria, and flawed linkages between the intervention and outcomes. Past PFP programs struggled because they were structured around the underlying concept that financial rewards to physicians could improve outcomes in a vacuum. A stronger design could rescue the core concept.

Social Impact Partnerships to Pay for Results (2018)

As we’ve seen, performance-based contracts can fall victim to predictable design errors. But, when structured well, these programs have the potential for impressive results. In support of improving the effectiveness of social services, the Social Impact Partnerships to Pay for Results Act (SIPPRA) was signed into law in 2018.

SIPPRA brings great promise for the next generation of performance-based contracts. The Act appropriates $100 million to the U.S. Department of the Treasury, $15 million of which is set aside for evaluation costs to support state and local governments in building a foundation for outcomes-based decision making. Funding can be used across a range of issue areas, including child and family welfare, health, education, and employment, creating extensive opportunities to address the country’s most pressing needs.

I’m personally incredibly proud of SIPPRA and the principles it follows. First and foremost, SIPPRA takes a clearly evidence-based approach to lifting Americans out of poverty: Funding flows to programs whose methods have been evaluated using data, supporting real-world efforts that achieve positive results.

In building programs based on evidence of what works, SIPPRA has the potential to finance the most effective solutions for fighting poverty, which originate not from Washington D.C., but from leaders on the ground in communities across the country. SIPPRA funding will support individuals and organizations that have been making a difference in their communities for decades, while bringing their ideas to policymakers to expand their reach. This intersection of community-based approaches and government support is what will ultimately most improve the lives of Americans in need.

Ryan reflects on the legacy, leadership, and lessons learned from Prime Minister Winston Churchill

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By: AIF Staff

Washington, DC – Last week, Paul Ryan, the President of the American Idea Foundation and a long-time admirer of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, delivered remarks as part of the Churchill Centre’s Leadership Series. In a conversation moderated by the Churchill Centre’s Program Director, Justin Reash, Speaker Ryan discussed the leadership, legacy, and lessons of Winston Churchill and how the wisdom of Churchill can help elected officials meet the challenges of our day.

Ryan also detailed how the American Idea Foundation is channeling Churchill to make an impact in communities around the country. He provided an update on the Foundation’s efforts to advance evidence-based public policies and to harness the ingenuity of community leaders, researchers, and legislators towards solutions with a track record of improving outcomes.

Video of the conversation is accessible here and some excerpts, edited slightly for clarity, follow.

Developing an early appreciation for Prime Minister Churchill and his leadership:

“I’m a big, big believer in the meritocracy of Congress and the meritocracy of ideas and policymaking. This means doing your homework, knowing your principles, understanding your philosophy, being able to debate and converse with people and being able to persuade. This is really what I got from Winston Churchill. That is so much more durable. You’re not going to be Icarus. You’re not going to be fleeting. You’re going to have a much more durable, meaningful career and that’s kind of the way I chose to do it….

“Jack Kemp kind of got me into Churchill. He was a huge Churchill fan, so I read and quickly chewed through [William] Manchester’s books when I was 23 or 24.  I just read Andrew Roberts’ book, Walking with Destiny. I re-read that a year ago. My dad had that book. My dad had all the Churchill books on our bookshelf and he had read them. My dad died when I was a kid, but he was a big Churchill fan so there was a reverence for Winston Churchill in my family….

“I read a lot of Churchill when I was a young man and was inspired by my mentor and it just so resonated with me. His wit, his intellect, his courage, his confidence, his ability to lead, and all the skills and the trials and tribulations. He went through his wilderness years and what he had to endure until he was the man for the moment who arguably saved Western civilization, I think it’s a history worth understanding and repeating if one can. And so, I just became consumed with all things Churchill because I thought if you want to aspire to be a leader, this is a great role model to have. I don’t drink like he did, but I just admire the man.”

Learning from mistakes and developing resiliency:

“The best takeaway that I got out of Churchill was to try and have a good, even-handed temperament, a sunny disposition, and look at things optimistically even when it is a tough time or you’ve had a large string of losses. I mean, surely it couldn’t be as bad as Great Britain in World War Two when Winston Churchill summoned his country to respond and to deserve victory. That kind of inspiration in the toughest of times and the most difficult circumstances pales in comparison to the kind of the trials and tribulations we go through these days.

“I’ve just drawn inspiration from that and I just think that this is what leaders should be like. These are the qualities that make a person a good leader when times are good and when times are bad. You know Churchill lost. He lost his election after World War Two. It’s just an amazing thing and then he came back here to Missouri to give us the Iron Curtain speech.

“The only other thing I’d say is try to see around corners. I’m worried, really worried, about our being a reserve currency and I’m concerned about our debt, our deficits, and our monetary policy. What got me into that was not just my love of economics, but my sort-of Churchillian sense of duty to look on the horizon and see those gathering storms. I always recommend to look at the storm clouds and see if you can do everything you can to get your country to improve its trajectory and to prevent horrible things from happening….

“I always sort of trained my mind: Don’t just get sucked in and focused on the here and the now, the politics of the day, or the cultural war of the moment. Look at what are those true, gathering storms on the horizon that are existential to democratic capitalism and to our American experiment and [focus on] what you can do to prepare people and policymakers in the country for these things to avert a crisis and steer around these problems. The lessons of Churchill are what got me focused on those things that I focused on in Congress.”

Providing advice for those looking to become Churchillian-type leaders:

“To a young person, I would say: Read the classics, learn the classics, understand the classics. Understand your philosophical argument, boil it down to an irreducible primary understanding of what you think and understand why you believe what you believe. Understand your opponent’s arguments extremely well so that you can make the case on both sides and so you can win your case. Be extremely resilient when you get knocked down. Fight for your cause and do it articulately. Do it effectively, do it with good cheer and when you get knocked down, get back up.

If you know Churchill, he had just as many losses as wins…. We think only that Winston Churchill won World War Two. We don’t [think of] the string of losses that he had, so the way I look at it is just never get demoralized. I mean look at what Churchill went through. It’s a lesson in adversity and tenacity and resilience and endurance.”

Detailing the genesis of the American Idea Foundation’s mission:

“I very much believe in this country’s founding. I believe in its principles, natural law, and natural rights. The motto of our Foundation is: The condition of your birth doesn’t determine the outcome of your life.

“I’m a big believer in democratic capitalism and natural rights and upper mobility. I worry that we’re going into this era of what I guess you could call “woke capitalism” where you have this new emotional attachment by young people to socialism, to zero-sum thinking, zero-sum economics, and a belief that life is not dynamic. There is such a thing as a win-win situation, positive sum economics, positive sum societies. And so, the American Idea Foundation seeks to explore this and prove it out by fighting poverty with center-right, market-based, poverty solutions and proving that the best way to make the most difference for the poor and the best way to get people out of poverty are center-right, free-market based solutions.

“We have a number of research projects and grassroots projects ongoing to try and reconnect people with the poor and to test ideas and prove that free-market solutions are the best way to get people out of poverty. It really is a poverty foundation for poverty solutions, but it also is a vindication of capitalism. It’s a vindication of free enterprise economics and it’s also a vindication of the political attitude and temperament that is inclusive and aspirational and is the polar opposite of identity politics.”

Focusing on evidence-based solutions, removing partisanship from poverty fighting debates:

“I got into a bunch of political battles in Congress, which ended up becoming ideological, partisan stalemates on poverty solutions. Every now and then when government lined up, we’d win something like a work requirement for welfare reform but more often than not, because we had divided government, we just had these stalemates on poverty policy because it became about ideology.

“So, I stepped back and rationally wrote a law with Patty Murray called the Evidence Act to use data and analytics to get access to all the data and statistics of government poverty programs and to measure the outcome of poverty programs and use scientific data and analytics and randomized control trials to see what works and what doesn’t work. We want to prove what works to get people out of poverty versus what doesn’t work and invariably, you find these principles that we believe in are validated.

“You can win an argument about the best way to get people out of poverty not by making an argument based on political rhetoric or political philosophy or ideology but making a fact-based argument using irrefutable statistics and that leapfrogs this ideological stalemate that we tend to get wrapped around the axle on.

“It gets to: Let’s agree on the front end. Do we want fewer poor people? Do we want the poor to get out of poverty? Yes. Okay, great. Let’s now find out what does that? How does that work? What is proven to work? And that is what we’re advancing through our data projects, so that we can more or less bypass these ideological stalemates and go with what actually works.

“I’m confident our principles of personal responsibility, of upward mobility, of free enterprise, of incentives, those principles work. And so, I think you can you can advance these ideas using data and statistics, instead of ideology and partisanship.”

Real world examples of the Foundation’s efforts to link practitioners, policymakers, and validators:

“We work with frontline fighters in the poverty space. One of them just passed away, a good friend of ours, Omar Jawhar, a black pastor down in North Dallas. He had COVID-19 and just passed away. He and his partner, Antong Lucky, a former gang member, said: “We’re basically going to get kids out of gangs and preventing them from joining gangs. They were doing a great job in the inner city of Dallas and making a big difference, so we brought some rigorous data and evaluation to the program to show how you can measure it, scale it, and replicate it.

“We work with academics. We work with Notre Dame’s Lab for Economic Opportunities (LEO) in their Economics department and we’re running randomized control trials on poverty solutions in Fort Worth, Texas, which is just one town over from Dallas. Catholic Charities has a program there called the Padua Program, which is creating a case-manager navigator to work with the poor, to develop a plan with incentives and disincentives to get people to help get themselves out of poverty. We’re doing rigorous analysis on how and why this works and how it works and what doesn’t work and what does work, so that we can build scale and replicate this across the country.

“We then work on scaling and replicating these programs around the country, getting people to see that if this is what you’re trying to achieve in your community whether the problem is homelessness, addiction, keeping people in technical college, or getting people just literally out of poverty, then here is what works. The Foundation connects grassroots leaders and poverty fighters who are working with the poor with academics, with problem solvers, and with resources and then helps prove a concept and tell the story.”

Future site visits in formation by the American Idea Foundation:

“COVID-19 threw a wrench in our gears. We had a big grassroots outreach plan for 2020. We were going to do Dallas. We were going to do South Carolina. We were going to do Indiana and we had plans with legislators to go into inner-city communities to meet with local leaders and local elected officials. COVID-19 put all that on the back burner, so then we put our research projects up front, like this Evidence-Based Clearinghouse that I’m talking about. We’re also doing a research project on Opportunity Zones, so we’ve been in more of the research mode because we have been in our homes.

“This summer, we’re going to start the grassroots wing of the Foundation back up. We are doing South Carolina with Tim Scott in Columbia and we’re just starting to do that kind of an outreach.”

Advice for those in younger democracies on how to achieve positive policy outcomes:

“To a Ukrainian, I would say that you’ve got to build your institutions because if you have a government based on the power of a personality, it will never work. You have to build up your institutions. I won’t prescribe specifically what kind of government [Ukraine] ought to have or how their democracy should work, but you’ve got to have separation of powers. You have to divide and separate the powers of your government in such a way that they work in healthy tension with one another, so that one cannot usurp the others. Then you have to build up those institutions like an independent judiciary, an independent legislature, an independent executive, and you have to build those institutions. Then you have to have transparency.”