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Larry Solomon's avatar

I promoted and conducted program evaluation at NIH for 22 years and, prior to that, did evaluation for 14 years at the request of Congress at the US Government Accountability Office (GAO). How soon we forget the Evidence Act, which was passed in 2018 and was designed to strengthen evaluation across HHS and the federal government overall. Apparently this is being ignored!

http://aspe.hhs.gov/topics/data/evidence-act-0

Elizabeth Ginexi's avatar

Yes! The NIH Director and his staff are ignorant. That’s what happens when you push out knowledgeable, experienced career staff and replace them with MAGA cronies.

Susan Volman's avatar

Liz, this is a great post. It’s a complete misuse of the concept of implementation science. However, I suppose there is one way they could use it: first they mandate that the NIH ICs implement programs that, e.g., fund reproducibility, and set aside funds for these programs. Then they show that the implementation succeeded.

Elizabeth Ginexi's avatar

They have no intention to do any legitimate accounting. The entire report was a performative document for trump.