Tracking and Evaluation of Research, Development, and Demonstration Programs at the US Department of Energy

With implementation of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the US Department of Energy (DOE) will play a central role in driving the technological innovations needed to reach the Biden administration’s net-zero greenhouse gas emissions goal. However, it needs additional capacity in several areas, including how best to pick winners for the demonstration projects it will be funding. We held a workshop on this topic and developed a follow-on white paper (Bergman et al. 2023). Another area, the topic of this paper, is establishing the capacity to operationalize and institutionalize impact evaluations, which includes developing approaches for tracking data to support evidence-building and help evaluate DOE’s research, development, and demonstration (RD&D) programs. Strengthening evaluation capacity is important for two reasons: it permits DOE and other interested parties to evaluate the success of programs in advancing and, ultimately, commercializing technologies; and it provides input to the agency for adaptive learning to improve its guidance to applicants (in the Funding Opportunity Announcements [FOAs]), decision protocols, and data collection.These two key pieces of legislation are not the only motivation for developing better program evaluations within DOE. The Evidence Act of 2018 US Congress, The Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2018, HR 4174, Pul L 115-435, 115th Congress, signed into law in January 2019. aims to modernize federal government data collection and management processes to better inform policy decisions. It requires agencies to assess their evaluation practices and create a plan to develop evidence-building activities. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is charged with improving these activities and evaluation by providing guidance and resources to agencies and engaging with evaluation officers; at DOE, each individual office is responsible for both functions (DOE 2022), with program managers in charge of conducting evaluations while following program evaluation standards (OMB 2020).This paper builds on a workshop held by Resources for the Future (RFF), informed by government publications and the academic literature, on evaluation and provides recommendations for building evaluation systems for DOE programs. Evaluation systems cover all the operational, organizational, and institutional elements that are needed, including human resources, organizational capacities, and evaluation practices. The report covers three topics: the state of program evaluation at DOE and in other relevant agencies, institutionalization of program evaluation within DOE, and characteristics of robust evaluation methods and their associated metrics and data needs. It closes with a series of recommendations.