At its core, COVID-19 relates to public health. However, the interconnected nature of the pandemic created challenges to nearly every facet of society.
COVID-19 resulted in long-lasting disruptions in education systems at every level. Business closures, rising unemployment, supply chain difficulties and other factors led to a 9.1% drop in economic output in the second quarter of 2020, the steepest quarterly decline on record. The deterioration of household incomes contributed to rising cases of eviction, housing instability, utility debt and mortgage delinquency. The pandemic also increased the need for digital connectivity and exacerbated deficits in water, sewer and broadband infrastructure. At the same time, debilitated government revenue hindered states’ abilities to tackle these issues.
The $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) was enacted to help mitigate a variety of challenges associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. The ARPA Coronavirus State Fiscal Recovery Funds (CSFRF) program provided $199.8 billion for states, territories and Washington, D.C., to respond to the public health emergency and its economic impacts, and for the provision of government services and infrastructure. An all-encompassing crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic requires a comprehensive approach. The fiscal recovery funds program offers state policymakers broad spending latitude to best meet the needs of individual communities.
Use of Evidence to Support Decisions
Recognizing that information is essential for effective decision-making and can help states allocate resources to programs and policies that are proven to work, the U.S. Department of the Treasury encourages recipients to use fiscal recovery funds for projects and programs that are supported by evidence. Recipients may also use the funds for program evaluation and evidence resources, which may include developing learning agendas to support evidence building, using clearinghouses to identify evidence-based interventions and adopting evidence-based programs and policies.
Treasury defines “evidence-based” as interventions that have strong or moderate evidence, meaning the evidence base supports causal conclusions for the program’s effectiveness. These can be determined through experimental studies, quasi-experimental studies and certain other studies that indicate positive findings on intended outcomes. The CSFRF final rule describes evidence clearinghouses as databases of research in particular program areas. Clearinghouses identify evidence-based programs, the strength of the evidence for those programs, and provide contextual or supporting information.
States, territories and Washington, D.C., are required to submit Recovery Plan Performance Reports detailing the use of their funds. In those reports, recipients describe the projects and programs they are implementing and how evidence-based interventions and program evaluation are incorporated into their plans. By reviewing recovery plans submitted in 2022 and 2023, NCSL analyzed and categorized how CSFRF recipients use evidence for project and program implementation.
State Examples
Evidence-collecting methods used by CSFRF recipients vary. Many recovery plans contain examples of recipients citing a general statistic on the topic without detailing program-specific evidence of effectiveness. For example, distributing grants to nonprofit entities because existing literature suggests that many nonprofits across the country incurred losses during the pandemic. There are also cases of recipients citing program-specific randomized-controlled trials and quasi-experimental studies that evaluate project effectiveness:
- District of Columbia: The High-Impact Tutoring project awards grants to organizations that deliver student tutoring programs. A randomized control trial of high-school internships in the region found that the program increases graduation and college application rates.
- North Carolina: Reinvestment Partners’ Produce Prescription Program seeks to address food insecurity. The program is being evaluated under two studies. One is an analysis of those participating in the program who are classified as low income and have hypertension. The other is a randomized controlled trial in partnership with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill researchers and health care providers for its impact on hypertension.
Not only have recipients used the CSFRF to fund programs supported by evidence, but also to fund the creation of evidence. Treasury recognizes that collecting high-quality data and developing evidence-based interventions may require building up staff, implementing new technologies or adopting new processes. To that end, recipients may use fiscal recovery funds to conduct program evaluations or enhance evidence-building capacity:
- Arizona: The AZ OnTrack Summer Camp program aims to mitigate learning loss for Pre-K through 12th grade public school students. The state set aside $3 million for a contractor to identify key outcomes and collect data to quantify the learnings and successes of the program.
- Connecticut: The state allocated $929,000 for programmatic evaluation of ARPA initiatives through the creation of an Evidence and Evaluation Unit.
- New Jersey: Directed $5 million for consulting services to review facility operations, policies, and procedures and provide recommendations for the improvement of state veterans’ homes.
- Tennessee: The state allocated $2 million for the Office of Evidence and Impact to determine the effectiveness of various programs, reevaluate funding of programs that have produced negative results and identify opportunities for further program evaluation.
NCSL’s ARPA: Evidence-Based Investments Database contains hundreds of examples of how recipients use and create evidence when allocating fiscal recovery funds. The database provides descriptions of individual projects and the methods used to evaluate project effectiveness. Users can filter by state, investment type, evidence-based intervention and Treasury expenditure category. The database provides a more detailed explanation of the methodology NCSL uses to categorize the use of evidence by CSFRF recipients.
COVID-19 gave rise to a large influx of federal funds aimed at helping states and territories mitigate challenges associated with the pandemic. The fiscal recovery funds program affords recipients wide spending discretion to tackle an extensive variety of issues. By using evidence to inform decision-making, states are more likely to invest in policies that will drive results and meet the needs of their communities.