OES Leads a National Evaluation of the American Rescue Plan and Publishes Equity Evaluation Series Memos

OES Leads a National Evaluation of the American Rescue Plan, What OES Is Working On, OES Publishes Equity Evaluation Series Memos

The American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (ARP) was designed to address immediate needs related to the pandemic, with a specific focus on addressing historically disparate outcomes across race, class, and geography that were further exacerbated by the pandemic. OES has built a portfolio of evidence on advancing equitable outcomes through the American Rescue Plan in collaboration with agency partners. Below we share updates on the National Evaluation, Analysis Plans for ARP Evaluations with forthcoming results, and a series of internal memos intended to guide our commitment to equity in our evaluation process.

OES Leads a National Evaluation of the American Rescue Plan

OES is leading a national evaluation as part of a portfolio of American Rescue Plan (ARP) evaluations aimed at building evidence about delivering an equitable recovery. The goal of this study is to provide an integrated account of whether, how, and to what extent the implementation of a subset of ARP programs served to achieve their intended outcomes, particularly with respect to advancing equity. Under the leadership of OES and the Office of Management and Budget Evidence Team, this four-year study will result in a repository of information about ARP programs and evaluation activities, cross-cutting evaluations that examine the overlapping nature of ARP investments, program-specific evaluations to fill priority evidence gaps, and other activities aimed at supporting ongoing efforts to learn from ARP program implementation. Federal Executive Branch employees can learn more about and access materials at the MAX.gov site.

What OES Is Working On

Analysis Plans for ARP Evaluations with Forthcoming Results: To ensure that our results mean what they are supposed to mean, we commit to posting detailed Analysis Plans before we analyze outcome data. The following Analysis Plans are part of the OES American Rescue Plan evaluation portfolio and we look forward to sharing results this fall:

• Identifying Interventions to Increase Affordable Care Act Uptake through a Systematic Review and Meta-analysis: A systematic review and meta-analysis evaluating the evidence on the effects of outreach interventions on ACA marketplace enrollment. 
• Increasing Access to Minnesota Child Care Stabilization Base Grants: A randomized impact evaluation aiming to identify methods to enhance equitable access to child care grants among child care providers in the state of Minnesota.
• Increasing Applications to the Homeowner Assistance Fund Using Mailers - Pilot: A randomized impact evaluation measuring the effectiveness of postcards aimed at increasing applications from households at risk of foreclosure.

The OES Project Process depicted below ensures our findings are relevant and reliable.

OES Publishes Equity Evaluation Series Memos

OES has recently published a series of memos intended to guide our commitment to equity in our evaluation process and our efforts toward understanding and reducing barriers to equitable access to federal programs. The memos are intended to be internal guidance documents for our team members, covering a range of topics including defining equity in quantitative evaluations, methodological guidance on choosing control variables in regression analyses, matching an evaluation method to your equity question, and guidance on using multinomial tests for differences in distribution. Their goal is to improve the consistency and quality of equity in OES evaluations, as well as to provide training resources for OES researchers in this field.