Sneak Preview: Treasury Develops Recovery Program Learning Agenda

(The following was excerpted from a recent Thompson Grants Compliance Expert article). The Department of the Treasury’s Office of Recovery Programs (ORP) is seeking stakeholder comments on a draft learning agenda that includes questions for evaluating the performance of programs created in response to the COVID-19 pandemic to enable the agency to better implement recovery programs, promote the outcomes of such programs and implement lessons learned for future economic crises.

The official purpose of a learning agenda is to “identify, prioritize and establish strategies to develop evidence to answer important short- and long-term strategic questions (i.e., questions about how the agency meets its mission(s), including about how programs, policies and regulations function both individually and in combination) and operational questions (i.e., questions about the agency’s operations like human resources, grantmaking procedures, financial systems and tracking, and internal processes).”

Treasury issued an agencywide learning agenda in April 2022, along with its federal fiscal year (FY) 2022-2026 Treasury Strategic Plan. To compliment these documents, ORP’s learning agenda goes into more detail about the following two key questions within Treasury’s overall learning agenda:

• To what extent are American Rescue Plan Act (ARP) (Pub. L. 117-2) programs being implemented equitably to encourage economically resilient communities, and what is the impact and/or outcomes of ARP programs on households, businesses and governments?
• What strategies deployed in the recovery from the pandemic best prevented evictions and foreclosures to promote a resilient housing market, and how can Treasury track evictions nationwide?

ORP notes that along with expanding on these questions, its learning agenda is heavily impacted by its evidence-building work in developing the agency’s April 2022 equity action plan. “The ORP learning agenda is premised on the idea that equity and outcomes are not mutually exclusive but rather inextricably linked — programs will not reach their true goals unless they are advancing more equitable outcomes,” ORP explains. Therefore, the questions within the ORP learning agenda seek to determine whether Treasury’s ARP-funded programs are being implemented equitably, and what barriers to equitable implementation exist.

Treasury says it does not expect to answer all of the questions within the learning agenda, as some questions “are intended to signal Treasury’s interest in a particular area of research and in exploring partnerships with external researchers to examine the relevant questions.” However, the learning agenda provides the office with particular aspects for program evaluation for FY 2022 and 2023. ORP recognizes that some of these questions may be removed or deprioritized as new questions of interest are identified in the future.

(The full version of this story has now been made available to all for a limited time here.)

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