Along with the various annual budgetary legislative acts that support and often control research and development (R&D) at government agencies and together with such legislation as the Stevenson-Wydler Technology Innovation Act of 1980 (Public Law No. 96-480) which directs the technology transfer processes with the private sector, the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993 (GPRA; P.L. 103-62) is a significant law. This act directs all government agencies (with very few exceptions, such as the Central Intelligence Agency) to enunciate in quantifiable form the “outcomes” (as opposed to “outputs”) of federal programs.
The GPRA was followed by the GPRA Modernization Act of 2010 (GPRAMA; P.L. 111-352), which stresses the Congress’s intent and imposes additional requirements on federal agencies. The intent of this legislation was to provide evidence to the Congress, and so to the public, that there is true value resulting from the budgetary investment in federal programs. For many such programs, types of assessments involving the reporting of metrics for evaluating a program’s outcomes in real time were doable, albeit somewhat difficult. However, for R&D, whose outcomes generally appear many years after funds have been expended, complying with GPRA’s short-term assessments of outcomes is not possible.1,2,3 Shorter-term outputs of R&D abound (papers, patents, citations, etc.), but outcomes in real time do not.
Another requirements document, specifically directed at federal R&D organizations, is the annual letter entitled “FY [-] Administration Research and Development Budget Priorities,” which is jointly signed by the directors of the Office of Management and Budget and of the OSTP. It contains a listing of the top-priority R&D issues identified by the President of the United States and his senior science advisors. Until 2012, the letter’s final paragraph, titled “Research and Development Investment Criteria,” specified that all such programs will be assessed for quality, relevance, and performance, and indicates that budget decisions will be made based on these assessments.
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1 National Research Council, 2008. Evaluating Research Efficiency in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The National Academies Press, Washington, D.C.
2 G. Jordan and E. Malone, 2001. “Performance Assessment,” Chapter 6 in Management of Publicly Funded Science. Department of Energy Office of Science. Available at http://www.science.doe.gov/sc-5/wren/benchmark.html.
3 G. Jordan, L. Streit, and J. Binkley, 2003. Assessing and improving the effectiveness of national research laboratories. IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management 50(2).