Ally Coll (CUNY School of Law) has posted Redefining Efficiency in the Doge Era: The Value of Evidence-Based Policymaking in Federal Agencies on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
In one of the first actions of his second term, President Donald Trump established the Department of Government Efficiency (“DOGE”) and tasked it with the mission of “making government work for the people again.” This basic theoretical goal is shared by a growing bipartisan group of policymakers and practitioners who have called for implementing evidence-based policymaking (“EBPM”) in federal agencies as a means of creating regulations that are more effective at achieving their desired policy outcomes. By asking agency officials to proactively build and apply evidence throughout the policymaking process, EBPM goes above and beyond the basic administrative law requirement that prohibits agencies from acting in ways that are arbitrary and capricious. Accordingly, various overlapping federal EBPM mandates have emerged over the past several decades, from Executive Orders requiring Cost-Benefit Analysis (“CBA”) to statutory mandates embedded in the 1993 Government Performance and Results Act (“GPRA”) and the 2018 Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act (“The Evidence Act”). Ultimately, however, these efforts have failed to codify inclusive, transparent, and trustworthy EBPM practices into the federal policymaking process, resulting in a gap in the law that ultimately led to the creation of DOGE. Despite its focus on government efficiency, DOGE eschewed evidence-based approaches under Elon Musk’s leadership during the early days of the second Trump Administration. As the most democratically accountable branch of government, however, Congress is well-positioned to reassert its control over the federal regulatory process by enacting improved EBPM statutory mandates, either in future authorizing statutes or by amending and improving the Evidence Act. In doing so, Congress can respond to evolving public concerns about government efficiency while protecting regulations that are evidence-based and effective at serving the American people.