Giving Compass' Take:

• Results for America provides policy recommendations that can be implemented to improve economic mobility in America.  

• How can funders work to make these policy recommendations reality in any political landscape? 

• Learn about cities' efforts to increase economic mobility. 

1. Create a new national “Economic Mobility Task Force” comprised of local, state, and national government leaders, human services providers, independent evaluators, and policy experts to develop national economic mobility goals and metrics for low- and middle-income Americans, families, and communities to be achieved by 2040.

2. Create a Chief Equity Officer in the White House to spearhead the Economic Mobility Task Force by relying on evidence and data to identify and address economic mobility disparities.

3. Improve the effectiveness of new and existing federal programs by setting aside 1% of their funds to strengthen the relevant federal agency’s evaluation capacity and to conduct rigorous program evaluations.

4. Require new and existing federal grantees to agree to participate in rigorous program evaluations as a condition of receiving funding.

5. Direct all federal agencies to prioritize rigorous evidence of effectiveness — including gold-standard randomized controlled trials wherever feasible — when allocating funds from their new and existing federal grant programs.

6. Launch a new “National Economic Mobility Innovation Fund” at the U.S. Department of the Treasury — modeled on the successful Social Innovation Fund previously operated by CNCS — to determine through a “pilot, test, scale” model which interventions and strategies work most effectively and efficiently to advance economic mobility across issue areas and federal agencies.

7. Support the aggressive implementation of the bipartisan Foundations for Evidence-based Policymaking Act of 2018 (Evidence Act) which advances federal agencies’ data and evidence-building functions and requires agency-wide evaluation plans and robust open data catalogues with strong privacy controls.

8. Work with Congress to enact a follow-up 2021 Evidence Act to ensure that federal agencies have the evidence and data capacity, resources, and authority needed to build rigorous evidence of what works and to use that evidence to increase economic mobility, including authorizing federal agencies to invest up to 1% of their program funds in evaluations (see Recommendation #2) and to prioritize rigorous evidence of effectiveness within all of their federal grant programs (see Recommendation #3).

9. Create and deploy “What Works SWAT teams” to help federal social services agencies advance their economic mobility efforts.

10. Increase support at federal social services agencies for research, development, and demonstration projects that increase shared prosperity, including creating partnerships between federal social services agencies that currently lack sufficient science and technology capacity with agencies like the National Science Foundation (NSF).

11. Use flexible hiring authorities at federal social services agencies to recruit people with expertise in science, technology, and innovation (such as human-centered design, data science, machine learning, and open innovation) to apply that expertise to our nation’s most pressing challenges.

12. Allocate funding to incentive prizes and other market-shaping approaches to accelerate the development of science and technology-enabled interventions that promote economic and social opportunity.