How DOGE Is Dismantling Government Research Capacity

Wasting Invaluable Public Resources to Save Pennies

Federal policy researchers and evaluators play a small but essential role in every area of government work. These social scientists and scholars work within federal agencies and in the adjacent evaluation industry to run experiments, share data, and measure the impacts of government policies. Their research improves programs that, for example, reduce recidivism, help students graduate community college, and help young adults find jobs.

“Unlike those of us in the policy world, most Americans do not spend much time thinking about statistical methodologies, impact analyses, and evidence standards. And they shouldn’t have to,”  writes Stephen Nuñez, Roosevelt’s director of stratification economics, in a new blog post. “Evaluators help make the government work better so that people can worry about other things. However, everyone should care about and take notice of what is now happening in the federal offices that oversee such work.”

Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has taken a (more-or-less literal) chainsaw to government agencies, leading to canceled contracts and mass layoffs of evaluators. Without access to that dedicated workforce and assessment capacity, agencies will be blind to the impacts of their activities moving forward—a recipe for ineffectiveness and waste, contrary to DOGE’s supposed efficiency agenda.

The key takeaway, according to Nuñez: DOGE is “destroying decades of institutional knowledge and expertise in exchange for the equivalent of the coins you might find between couch cushions.”

Read the blog post: “The Irreparable Damage Being Done to Federal Policy Research and Evaluation”

What We’re Talking About

What We’re Reading

• Uncertainty surrounding the Trump administration’s whiplash-inducing tariff policy and chaotic firings are damaging the economy. 
  • “It’s less like the economy is in a car wreck, and it’s more like the economy has decided to start smoking a pack a day,” Roosevelt Principal Economist Michael Madowitz told the New York Times.
• An Alabama court is poised to greenlight prosecutions of organizations that help women travel to access safe, legal abortions in other states. As Roosevelt Fellow Rachel Rebouché points out, “If you go to Las Vegas to gamble, but your state doesn’t permit it, you don’t expect for your AG to suggest that anybody who helped you gamble in another state is going to be prosecuted, fined, and jailed.”
• New York state is home to some of the world’s biggest financial institutions—as such, Vanessa Fajans-Turner argues for American Banker, the state has an obligation to step in to enforce climate rules for banks if the federal government has abdicated its responsibility. 
  • Certain states are already taking up the climate regulation mantle by proposing new climate disclosure rules.