This is the first in a series of interviews with influential Republicans and Democrats in Congress about evidence and innovation issues.
Congressman Todd Young (R-IN) is seen as a Republican leader on social welfare issues. He is the second-ranking Republican member of the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Human Resources, which conducted a hearing on evidence and social policy earlier this week. His subcommittee is also likely to be the starting point for any evidence-based bills that move in the House in this session.
We asked him about his recently-introduced Social Impact Partnership Act, as well as the Republican vision for evidence and innovation in social policy more generally.
SIRC: Thank you for joining us Congressman Young. Let’s start our discussion with a bill you cosponsored this year with Congressman John Delaney (D-MD) called the Social Impact Partnership Act (H.R. 1336). Our readers are fairly familiar with its broad outlines. Can you tell us what motivated you personally to introduce this bill?
Congressman Young: Before I served in Congress, I was on the board of an organization that worked with homeless veterans, and as an attorney I provided pro bono legal services to couples looking to adopt. These are some of the seemingly intractable issues we grapple with as a country, and never seem to make enough of an impact.
I was excited to become a member of the Ways and Means Subcommittee on Human Resources because they work directly with these challenging problems. Early on, we became aware of some phenomenal reforms they had been making in the United Kingdom that were showing some promise. One of them was the social impact bond financing mechanism, which I quickly realized could have broad application here in the states. As I began talking with the UK government, I learned most of their interventions were adopted from U.S.-based civil society, which gave me more confidence in their applicability here.
It took our team about a year to work through all the issues of adapting it from their parliamentary system of government and coming up with something that would work in our presidential system. Also, it’s worth noting that we sunset the bill after ten years; if the whole point is to evaluate policies to see what works, I think that same standard ought to be applied to the underlying bill.
SIRC: Your bill appears to be part of a broader, bipartisan effort to increase performance and results in government. Last year, your Republican colleague, Rep. Paul Ryan, reached out to a prominent Democrat on the Senate side, Sen. Patty Murray, to introduce legislation that would create a new federal evidence commission. The two are expected to introduce similar legislation this year. What can you tell us about the commission? Why is it needed?
Congressman Young: When the federal government wants to experiment with social policy, we primarily do so through either pilot programs or by granting waivers to states. So when I got onto the Human Resources Subcommittee two years ago, the first thing I wanted to do was look at all the pilot programs and waiver programs that have been launched in the social space over the past few decades to see what has worked and what hasn’t.
We quickly learned, though, that a) most of these programs don’t have any sort of evaluative requirement; b) when there is an evaluative requirement, there often isn’t a requirement to make the results public; and c) when the results are made public, you’ve got to go to each agency and get through particular process for obtaining them. The effort ended up not being instructive in terms of what works, but it was instructive in terms of institutional challenges we face in trying to improve the system.
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