The Clean Air Act. The Clean Water Act. The National Environmental Policy Act. These and most of our nation’s other foundational environmental laws were passed decades ago – and they have started to show their age. The Clean Air Act, for instance, was written to cut air pollution, not to drive the whole-of-economy response that the climate crisis now warrants. The Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975 was designed to make cars more efficient in a pre-electric vehicle era, and now puts the Department of Transportation in the awkward position of setting fuel economy standards in an era when more and more cars don’t burn gas.

Trying to manage today’s problems with yesterday’s laws results in government by kludge. Legacy regulatory architecture has foundered under a patchwork of legislative amendments and administrative procedures designed to bridge the gap between past needs and present realities. Meanwhile, Congressional dysfunction has made purpose-built updates exceptionally difficult to land. The Inflation Reduction Act, for example, was mostly designed to move money rather than rethink foundational statutes or regulatory processes – because those rethinks couldn’t make it past the filibuster.

As the efficacy of environmental laws has waned, so has their durability. What was once a broadly shared goal – protecting Americans from environmental harm – is now a political football, with rules that whipsaw back and forth depending on who’s in charge. 

The second Trump Administration launched the biggest environmental deregulatory campaign in history against this backdrop. But that campaign, coupled with massive reductions in the federal civil service and a suite of landmark court decisions (including Loper Bright) about how federal agencies regulate, risks pushing U.S. regulatory architecture past the point of sensible and much-needed reform and into a state of complete disrepair.

Dismantling old systems has proven surprisingly easy. Building what comes next will be harder. And the work must begin now. 

It is time to articulate a long-term vision for a government that can actually deliver in an ever-more complex society. The Federation of American Scientists (FAS) is meeting this moment by launching an ambitious new project to reimagine the U.S. environmental regulatory state, drawing ideas from across ideological lines.

The Beginning of a New Era

Fear of the risks of systemic change often prevent people from entertaining change in earnest. Think of the years of U.S. squabbles over how or whether to reform permitting and environmental review, while other countries simply raced ahead to build clean energy projects and establish dominance in the new world economy. Systemic stagnation, however, comes with its own consequences. 

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) are a case in point when it comes to climate and the environment. Together, these two pieces of legislation represented the largest global investment in the promise of a healthier, more sustainable, and, yes, cheaper future. Unfortunately, as proponents of the “abundance” paradigm and others have observed, rollout was hampered by inefficient processes and outdated laws. Implementing the IRA and the IIJA via old systems, in short, was like trying to funnel an ocean through a garden hose – and as a result, most Americans experienced only a trickle of real-world impact.

Similar barriers are constraining state progress. For example, the way we govern and pay for electricity has not kept pace with a rapidly changing energy landscape – meaning that the United States risks ceding leadership on energy technologies critical to national security, economic competitiveness, and combating climate change.

But we are perhaps now entering a new era. The United States appears to be on the edge of real political realignments, with transpartisan stakes around the core role of government in economic development that do not match up neatly to current coalitions. This realignment presents a crucial opportunity to catalyze a new era of climate, environmental, and democratic progress.

FAS will leverage this opportunity by providing a forum for debate and engagement on different facets of climate and environmental governance, a platform to amplify insights, and the capacity to drive forward solutions. Examples of topics ripe for exploration include:

• Balancing agility and accountability. As observed, regulatory approaches of the past have struggled to address the interconnected, quickly evolving nature of climate and environmental challenges. At the same time, mechanisms for ensuring accountability have been disrupted by an evolving legal landscape and increasingly muscular executive. There is a need to imagine and test new systems designed to move quickly but responsibly on climate and environmental issues. 
• Complementing traditional regulation through novel strategies. There is growing interest in using novel financial, contractual, and other strategies as a complement to regulation for driving climate and environmental progress. There is considerable room to go deeper in this space, identifying both the power of these strategies and their limits. 
• Rethinking stakeholder engagement. The effectiveness of regulation depends on its ability to serve diverse stakeholder needs while advancing environmental goals. Public comment and other pipelines for engaging stakeholders and integrating external perspectives and expertise into regulations have been disrupted by technologies such as AI, while the relationship between regulated entities and their regulators has become increasingly adversarial. There is a need to examine synergies and tradeoffs between centering stakeholders and centering outcomes in regulatory processes, as well as examine how stakeholder engagement could be improved to better ensure regulations that are informed, feasible, durable, and distributively fair. 

In working through topics like these, FAS seeks to lay out a positive vision of regulatory reconstruction that is substantively superior to either haphazard destruction or incremental change. Our vision is nothing less than to usher in a new paradigm of climate and environmental governance: one that secures a livable world while reinforcing democratic stability, through systems that truly deliver for America. 

We will center our focus on the federal government given its important role in climate and environmental issues. However, states and localities do a lot of the work of a federated government day-to-day. We recognize that federal cures are unlikely to fully alleviate the symptoms that Americans are experiencing every day, from decaying infrastructure to housing shortages. We are committed to ensuring that solutions are appropriately matched to the root cause of state capacity problems and that federal climate and environmental regulatory regimes are designed to support successful cooperation with local governments and implementation partners. 

FAS is no stranger to ambitious endeavors like these. Since our founding in 1945, we have been committed to tackling the major science policy issues that reverberate through American life. This new FAS workstream will be embedded across our Climate and Environment, Clean Energy, and Government Capacity portfolios. We have already begun engaging and activating the diverse community of scholars, experts, and leaders laying the intellectual groundwork to develop compelling answers to urgent questions surrounding the climate regulatory state, against the backdrop of a broader state capacity movement. True to our nonpartisan commitment, we will build this work on a foundation of cross-ideological curiosity and play on the tension points in existing coalitions that strike us all as most productive.

We invite you to join us in conversation and collaboration. If you want to get involved, contact Zoë Brouns (zbrouns@fas.org).

The federal government transfers approximately $1.1 trillion dollars every year to state and local governments. Yet most states and localities are not evaluating whether the programs deploying these funds are increasing community well-being. Similarly, achieving important national goals like increasing clean energy production and transmission often requires not only congressional but also state and local policy reform. Yet many states and localities are not implementing the evidence-based policy reforms necessary to achieve these goals.

State and local government innovation is a problem not only of politics but also of capacity. State and local governments generally lack the technical capacity to conduct rigorous evaluations of the efficacy of their programs, search for reliable evidence about programs evaluated in other contexts, and implement the evidence-based programs with the highest chances of improving outcomes in their jurisdictions. This lack of capacity severely constrains the ability of state and local governments to use federal funds effectively and to adopt more effective ways of delivering important public goods and services. To date, efforts to increase the use of evaluation evidence in federal agencies (including the passage of the Evidence Act) have not meaningfully supported the production and use of evidence by state and local governments.

Despite an emerging awareness of the importance of state and local government innovation capacity, there is a shortage of plausible strategies to build that capacity. In the words of journalist Ezra Klein, we spend “too much time and energy imagining the policies that a capable government could execute and not nearly enough time imagining how to make a government capable of executing them.”

Yet an emerging body of research is revealing that an effective strategy to build government innovation capacity is to partner government agencies with local universities on scientifically rigorous evaluations of the efficacy of their programs, curated syntheses of reliable evaluation evidence from other contexts, and implementation of evidence-based programs with the best chances of success. Leveraging these findings, along with recent evidence of the striking efficacy of the national network of university-based “Agriculture Experiment Stations” established by the Hatch Act of 1887, we propose a national network of university-based “Policy Experiment Stations” or policy innovation labs in each state, supported by continuing federal and state appropriations and tasked with accelerating state and local government innovation.  

Challenge

Advocates of abundance have identified “failed public policy” as an increasingly significant barrier to economic growth and community flourishing. Of particular concern are state and local policies and programs, including those powered by federal funds, that do not effectively deliver critically important public goods and services like health, education, safety, clean air and water, and growth-oriented infrastructure.

Part of the challenge is that state and local governments lack capacity to conduct rigorous evaluations of the efficacy of their policies and programs. For example, the American Rescue Plan, the largest one-time federal investment in state and local governments in the last century, provided $350 billion in State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds to state, territorial, local, and Tribal governments to accelerate post-pandemic economic recovery. Yet very few of those investments are being evaluated for efficacy. In a recent survey of state policymakers, 59% of those surveyed cited “lack of time for rigorous evaluations” as a key obstacle to innovation. State and local governments also typically lack the time, resources, and technical capacity to canvass evaluation evidence from other settings and assess whether a program proven to improve outcomes elsewhere might also improve outcomes locally. Finally, state and local governments often don’t adopt more effective programs even when they have rigorous evidence that these programs are more effective than the status quo, because implementing new programs disrupts existing workflows. 

If state and local policymakers don’t know what works and what doesn’t, and/or aren’t able to overcome even relatively minor implementation challenges when they do know what works, they won’t be able to spend federal dollars more effectively, or more generally to deliver critical public goods and services.

Opportunity

A growing body of research on government innovation is documenting factors that reliably increase the likelihood that governments will implement evidence-based policy reform. First, government decision makers are more likely to adopt evidence-based policy reforms when they are grounded in local evidence and/or recommended by local researchers. Boston-based researchers sharing a Boston-based study showing that relaxing density restrictions reduces rents and house prices will do less to convince San Francisco decision makers than either a San Francisco-based study, or San Francisco-based researchers endorsing the evidence from Boston. Proximity matters for government innovation.

Second, government decision makers are more likely to adopt evidence-based policy reforms when they are engaged as partners in the research projects that produce the evidence of efficacy, helping to define the set of feasible policy alternatives and design new policy interventions. Research partnerships matter for government innovation.

Third, evidence-based policies are significantly more likely to be adopted when the policy innovation is part of an existing implementation infrastructure, or when agencies receive dedicated implementation support. This means that moving beyond incremental policy reforms will require that state and local governments receive more technical support in overcoming implementation challenges. Implementation matters for government innovation. 

We know that the implementation of evidence-based policy reform produces returns for communities that have been estimated to be on the order of 17:1. Our partners in government have voiced their direct experience of these returns. In Puerto Rico, for example, decision makers in the Department of Education have attributed the success of evidence-based efforts to help students learn to the “constant communication and effective collaboration” with researchers who possessed a “strong understanding of the culture and social behavior of the government and people of Puerto Rico.” Carrie S. Cihak, the evidence and impact officer for King County, Washington, likewise observes, 

“It is critical to understand whether the programs we’re implementing are actually making a difference in the communities we serve. Throughout my career in King County, I’ve worked with  County teams and researchers on evaluations across multiple policy areas, including transportation access, housing stability, and climate change. Working in close partnership with researchers has guided our policymaking related to individual projects, identified the next set of questions for continual learning, and has enabled us to better apply existing knowledge from other contexts to our own. In this work, it is essential to have researchers who are committed to valuing local knowledge and experience–including that of the community and government staff–as a central part of their research, and who are committed to supporting us in getting better outcomes for our communities.” 

The emerging body of evidence on the determinants of government innovation can help us define a plan of action that galvanizes the state and local government innovation necessary to accelerate regional economic growth and community flourishing. 

Plan of Action 

An evidence-based plan to increase state and local government innovation needs to facilitate and sustain durable partnerships between state and local governments and neighboring universities to produce scientifically rigorous policy evaluations, adapt evaluation evidence from other contexts, and develop effective implementation strategies. Over a century ago, the Hatch Act of 1887 created a remarkably effective and durable R&D infrastructure aimed at agricultural innovation, establishing university-based Agricultural Experiment Stations (AES) in each state tasked with developing, testing, and translating innovations designed to increase agricultural productivity. 

Locating university-based AES in every state ensured the production and implementation of locally-relevant evidence by researchers working in partnership with local stakeholders. Federal oversight of the state AES by an Office of Experiment Stations in the US Department of Agriculture ensured that work was conducted with scientific rigor and that local evidence was shared across sites. Finally, providing stable annual federal appropriations for the AES, with required matching state appropriations, ensured the durability and financial sustainability of the R&D infrastructure. This infrastructure worked: agricultural productivity near the experiment stations increased by 6% after the stations were established.

Congress should develop new legislation to create and fund a network of state-based “Policy Experiment Stations.”

 The 119th Congress that will convene on January 3, 2025 can adapt the core elements of the proven-effective network of state-based Agricultural Experiment Stations to accelerate state and local government innovation. Mimicking the structure of 7 USC 14, federal grants to states would support university-based “Policy Experiment Stations” or policy innovation labs in each state, tasked with partnering with state and local governments on (1) scientifically rigorous evaluations of the efficacy of state and local policies and programs; (2) translations of evaluation evidence from other settings; and (3) overcoming implementation challenges. 

As in 7 USC 14, grants to support state policy innovation labs would be overseen by a federal office charged with ensuring that work was conducted with scientific rigor and that local evidence was shared across sites. We see two potential paths for this oversight function, paths that in turn would influence legislative strategy.

Pathway 1: This oversight function could be located in the Office of Evaluation Sciences (OES) in the General Services Administration (GSA). In this case, the congressional committees overseeing GSA, namely the House Committee on Oversight and Responsibility and the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, would craft legislation providing for an appropriation to GSA to support a new OES grants program for university-based policy innovation labs in each state. The advantage of this structure is that OES is a highly respected locus of program and policy evaluation expertise. 

Pathway 2: Oversight could instead be located in the Directorate of Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships in the National Science Foundation (NSF TIP). In this case, the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology and the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation would craft legislation providing for a new grants program within NSF TIP to support university-based policy innovation labs in each state. The advantage of this structure is that NSF is a highly respected grant-making agency. 

Either of these paths is feasible with bipartisan political will. Alternatively, there are unilateral steps that could be taken by the incoming administration to advance state and local government innovation. For example, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) recently released updated Uniform Grants Guidance clarifying that federal grants may be used to support recipients’ evaluation costs, including “conducting evaluations, sharing evaluation results, and other personnel or materials costs related to the effective building and use of evidence and evaluation for program design, administration, or improvement.” The Uniform Grants Guidance also requires federal agencies to assess the performance of grant recipients, and further allows federal agencies to require that recipients use federal grant funds to conduct program evaluations. The incoming administration could further update the Uniform Grants Guidance to direct federal agencies to require that state and local government grant recipients set aside grant funds for impact evaluations of the efficacy of any programs supported by federal funds, and further clarify the allowability of subgrants to universities to support these impact evaluations.

Conclusion

Establishing a national network of university-based “Policy Experiment Stations” or policy innovation labs in each state, supported by continuing federal and state appropriations, is an evidence-based plan to facilitate abundance-oriented state and local government innovation. We already have impressive examples of what these policy labs might be able to accomplish. At MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab North America, the University of Chicago’s Crime Lab and Education Lab, the University of California’s California Policy Lab, and Harvard University’s The People Lab, to name just a few, leading researchers partner with state and local governments on scientifically rigorous evaluations of the efficacy of public policies and programs, the translation of evidence from other settings, and overcoming implementation challenges, leading in several cases to evidence-based policy reform. Yet effective as these initiatives are, they are largely supported by philanthropic funds, an infeasible strategy for national scaling.

In recent years we’ve made massive investments in communities through federal grants to state and local governments. We’ve also initiated ambitious efforts at growth-oriented regulatory reform which require not only federal but also state and local action. Now it’s time to invest in building state and local capacity to deploy federal investments effectively and to galvanize regional economic growth. Emerging research findings about the determinants of government innovation, and about the efficacy of the R&D infrastructure for agricultural innovation established over a century ago, give us an evidence-based roadmap for state and local government innovation.

This action-ready policy memo is part of Day One 2025 — our effort to bring forward bold policy ideas, grounded in science and evidence, that can tackle the country’s biggest challenges and bring us closer to the prosperous, equitable and safe future that we all hope for whoever takes office in 2025 and beyond.

PLEASE NOTE (February 2025): Since publication several government websites have been taken offline. We apologize for any broken links to once accessible public data.