Authors:
The Council of State Governments
The National Conference of State Legislatures
The Policy Lab at Brown University
States have a historic chance to capitalized on funding from the American Rescue Plan Act to further the use of evidence in policymaking. Federal guidance on the rescue plan encourages states, territories and other jurisdictions to invest in evidence-based programs and practices, and it allows states to use these limited-time funds for discrete costs, such as data analysis and collection, program evaluations, and improvements to data and technology infrastructure. Investing in evidence work with American Rescue Plan dollars could pay off major dividends in the future by funding implementation of evidence-based programs, paying for rigorous program evaluations of preexisting programs, creating or enhancing data infrastructure to enable sharing information across agencies/states, and putting American Rescue Plan-funded programs into a learning agenda to gauge their effectiveness and inform future programs.
Learn more about utilizing these funds in this report from The Council of State Governments, the National Conference of State Legislatures and The Policy Lab at Brown University, which can be accessed here:
https://web.csg.org/recovery/wp-content/uploads/sites/24/2022/04/ARP_Resource2_March2022_AS_v2.pdf