“Every man has a right to his own opinion,” investor Bernard Baruch said in 1950, “but no man has a right to be wrong in his facts.”

Politicians are, of course, sometimes wrong on the facts, but the federal government is actually making significant progress to bring hard evidence into the policymaking process. It might sound obvious, but it’s actually one of the most promising ideas in governance: “evidence-based policymaking,” the use of credible research to drive public policy, and independent evaluation to decide which government programs work, and which don’t.

It’s also a rare case where the White House and the Republican Congress have found common ground, at least rhetorically. The House has already passed a bipartisan bill from Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) to establish a commission charged with finding ways to use evidence and evaluation to improve public policy. Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) called the Ryan-Murray bill an example of “the type of common sense reforms that defy partisan rankling.” President Barack Obama included the Ryan-Murray proposal in his most recent budget, and the bill awaits consideration on the Senate floor.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration has been implementing evidence-based initiatives of its own. Its push for more data-driven policymaking has drawn positive attention from Republicans such as Ron Haskins, a former staffer for the House Ways and Means Committee and the George W. Bush White House, whose recent book is titled “Show Me the Evidence: Obama’s Fight for Rigor and Results in Social Policy.”

“Hardly anyone knows it,” Haskins wrote in the New York Times, “but since its earliest days the Obama administration has been pursuing the most important initiative in the history of federal attempts to use evidence to improve social programs.”

But even though Congress appears to support evidence-based policymaking in theory, a closer look shows that it is waging a quiet war on the idea. The current versions of spending bills on Capitol Hill would defund data collection, analysis, and pilot programs that are helping to solve some of the toughest challenges facing the nation.

Amid the larger debate about overall spending levels under sequestration, some cuts to evidence-based programs were probably inevitable. But this Congress seems to be targeting evidence-based initiatives in particular, and for reasons that seem deeply political.

THE ATTACK IS most apparent in the field of climate science. If Congress were sincerely skeptical about climate change, then the first smart move would be to increase funding for more research to better understand the issue. Instead, congressional spending bills would reduce research support, with both the House and Senate cutting competitive grants that fund data collection and modeling to measure changes in the climate. The House is pushing for especially large cuts to climate science, which would also undermine research to help communities figure out how to deal with increased risks from natural disasters and other consequences of climate change.

Similarly, Congress is also suppressing inconvenient truths about gun violence by rejecting efforts to gather more evidence to understand this problem. Earlier this year, both the House and Senate appropriations committees advanced funding bills that include restrictions on public health research that have discouraged almost any federal data collection or analysis on gun deaths. (Unfortunately, this is not a new problem—at the behest of the National Rifle Association, Congress has used appropriations bills to discourage public health research on gun violence for nearly two decades.) House Appropriations Committee Ranking Member Nita Lowey (D-NY) offered an amendment to lift the restriction in this year’s bill, but the committee rejected it by a vote of 19-32. As Rep. Lowey said before the vote, “Preventing research because you worry about the outcome is cowardly.”

Congress is also refusing to allocate funding to expand state-based efforts to collect comprehensive data about violent crime. Thirty-two states currently use the National Violent Death Reporting System, the most comprehensive database for information on violent deaths, including homicides, suicides, intimate partner violence, police-involved deaths, and deaths from child abuse. The federal government provides financial support to help states use the system, but this funding is inadequate to assist all the states that apply. Despite interest at the state level, the House and Senate both rejected the Obama Administration’s proposal to increase funding in order to enable all 50 states and the District of Columbia to participate.

This toxic political environment is especially problematic in health care. Researching and evaluating new ideas to slow the growth of health care costs was a major focus of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), both to make healthcare affordable for families and to ensure that Medicare and Medicaid are fiscally sustainable for future generations. Health care cost growth has measurably slowed in recent years—contributing to a significant improvement in the federal budget outlook—but Congress is threatening to reverse that progress.

Congress is using appropriations bills to attack the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), a little-known agency where recent research helped to bring down the rate of hospital-acquired conditions by 17 percent between 2010 and 2013. This decline translates to about 50,000 lives saved, and is one of the ways that experts believe the ACA is working to reduce health care costs. The Senate Appropriations Committee is advocating a 35 percent cut to AHRQ, and the House Appropriations Committee wants to completely eliminate the agency.

Meanwhile, the House Appropriations Committee is seeking to rescind $6.8 billion from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI), the agency charged with testing new models to pay more efficiently for health care and improve the quality of care for patients. Republican committee leaders in the House and Senate might be skeptical of CMMI, but the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that CMMI initiatives will reduce federal health care spending by a total of $38 billion from 2016 to 2025—more than three times the $11 billion that CMMI will spend over that period. (Ironically, as the House attacks programs that are actually working to control Medicare costs, it is also pushing to turn Medicare into a voucher program—using out-of-control costs as the justification.)

Congress is also threatening significant progress towards evidence-based practices in education. Both the House and Senate appropriations committees advanced funding bills that would terminate the Investing in Innovation Fund—a relatively new federal initiative that is scaling-up promising evidence-backed education programs, and evaluating these expansions to determine which programs can be scaled up effectively.

One of the programs supported by the Investing in Innovation Fund is Success for All, an education model first deployed in 1987 that has demonstrated positive outcomes in scientific evaluations. In South Carolina, Success for All recently turned around a once-failing middle school featured in the 2005 documentary “Corridor of Shame,” with the school now reporting higher test scores, fewer behavioral problems, and more parental involvement. After an elementary school in the impoverished Tohono O’odham Reservation in Arizona adopted Success for All, 63 percent of its students in the third through fifth grades passed statewide reading tests—up from an abysmal 18 percent just three years earlier.

As stated in a recent independent evaluation of the Success for All scale up, “At a time when school districts are facing straitened economic conditions, it is all the more important to adopt policies and programs that have been shown to work.” Yet Congress is undermining exactly that effort.

TODAY'S CONGRESSIONAL LEADERS did not always oppose evidence-based policymaking. In 2002, Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) was the chairman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, and a leader in creating an agency called the Institute of Education Sciences. That agency—which was charged with objectively evaluating “the effectiveness of Federal and other education programs” without partisan or ideological bias—is today the target of a 29 percent budget cut from Speaker Boehner’s own chamber.

To be clear, there are still conservatives outside of Congress who support funding programs that gather evidence to improve public policy. In addition to Haskins, Michael Strain of the conservative American Enterprise Institute recently sounded the alarm about proposed cuts to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), which would undermine BLS data about jobs and the economy on which policymakers and businesses rely to make decisions. As Strain notes, “If better policy is your destination, then better data is your map.”

Unlike the attacks on climate science, gun research, health care reform, and the Investing in Innovation Fund—where partisanship seems to be at the core of congressional hostility—it is less clear why Congress wants to cut agencies like BLS and the Institute of Education Sciences. It could be that these evidence gathering functions have simply become a low priority for Congress. These cuts have severe consequences over the long term, but the average American is not likely to feel an immediate impact. This short-sighted attitude would also explain why Congress is cutting its own budget.

The decision by Congress to weaken its own ability to gather and process evidence might be the most troubling example of how Congress has lost interest in applying evidence to inform public policy. These budget cuts undermine vital nonpartisan institutions within the legislative branch, including the policy experts at the Congressional Research Service and the investigators at the Government Accountability Office. These institutions are critical sources for Congress to get credible research and evaluation of public policy from experts who are independent from the executive branch. Budget cuts also make it harder for members and committees of Congress to hire and retain their own top-notch policy staff to understand complex issues, which makes legislators more dependent on expertise from lobbyists and interest groups.

This year’s budget debate will determine whether the federal government continues to bring better evidence into the policymaking process. If Congress stalls or reverses this effort, it will only succeed in making government less efficient and effective—and forgo one of the best opportunities for bipartisan cooperation with the Obama Administration. As Rep. Ryan said when he and Sen. Murray introduced their legislation to establish a commission on evidence-based policymaking, “If we want to make government more effective, we need to know what works.”

Harry Stein is the Director of Fiscal Policy at the Center for American Progress.

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