To increase the real and perceived benefit of research funding, funding agencies should develop challenge goals for their extramural research programs focused on the impact portion of their mission.
Americans trade stocks instantly, but spend 13 hours on tax forms. They send cash by text, but wait weeks for IRS responses. The nation’s revenue collector ranks dead last in citizen satisfaction. The problem isn’t just paperwork — it’s how the government builds.
While it seems that the current political climate may not incentivize the use of evidence-based data sources for decision making, those of us who are passionate about ensuring results for the American people will continue to firmly stand on the belief that learning agendas are a crucial component to successfully navigate a changing future.
In recent months, we’ve seen much of these decades’ worth of progress erased. Contracts for evaluations of government programs were canceled, FFRDCs have been forced to lay off staff, and federal advisory committees have been disbanded.
At a recent workshop, we explored the nature of trust in specific government functions, the risk and implications of breaking trust in those systems, and how we’d known we were getting close to specific trust breaking points.
What if low trust was not a given? Or, said another way: what if we had the power to improve trust in government – what would that world look like?
Datasets and variables that do not align with Administration priorities, or might reflect poorly on Administration policy impacts, seem to be especially in the cross-hairs.
At a period where the federal government is undergoing significant changes in how it hires, buys, collects and organizes data, and delivers, deeper exploration of trust in these facets as worthwhile.
Using visioning, world-building, scenario planning, and other foresight tools, participants set aside today’s constraints to design blue-sky models of a future American government.
“The first rule of government transformation is: there are a lot of rules. And there should be-ish. But we don’t need to wait for permission to rewrite them. Let’s go fix and build some things and show how it’s done.”
Using the NIST as an example, the Radiation Physics Building (still without the funding to complete its renovation) is crucial to national security and the medical community. If it were to go down (or away), every medical device in the United States that uses radiation would be decertified within 6 months, creating a significant single point of failure that cannot be quickly mitigated.
As the former U.S. Chief Data Scientist, I know first-hand how valuable and vulnerable our nation’s federal data assets are. Like many things in life, we’ve been taking our data for granted and will miss it terribly when it’s gone.