The Administration for Children and Families (ACF) plans to restructure its research and evaluation operations, decentralizing much of that work and downsizing its Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation (OPRE), Youth Services Insider has learned.
The move, which was announced in an internal memo dated Feb. 10, has some in the research community concerned that some federally funded work will be halted or subjected to political whims.
ACF is a $70 billion agency that oversees a range of programs and services that include child care, refugee support, family assistance and child welfare. Research and evaluation related to those programs has long been handled by OPRE, with a budget of about $150 million.
The ACF research and evaluation agenda, posted on the office’s website, lists nine program areas: Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention and Sexual Risk Avoidance, Child Care, Child Support Enforcement, Child Welfare, Head Start, Health Profession Opportunity Grants, Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood, Home Visiting, and Welfare and Family Self-sufficiency.
The memo announcing the restructuring, written by Assistant Secretary for Family Support Alex Adams, argues that ACF research projects will benefit from more proximity to the staff in charge of those various silos.
“Situating research staff within program offices ensures that study designs benefit from deep programmatic expertise and operational realities,” Adams said, and “eliminates barriers to evidence utilization.”
Adams’ memo states that by late February, ACF will have produced a realignment plan that transfers “responsibility for completing ACF’s research activities” to the program offices overseeing early childhood, child welfare and family assistance.
OPRE, Adams says in the memo, will serve to advise program offices on research practice and policy, and maintain a small number of projects that are “benefited by their generalist expertise.”
Naomi Goldstein, who led OPRE from 2004 to 2022, said the office has developed research and evaluation questions with program staff “for decades.” But that’s different from relying on program offices to ensure research quality and impartiality.
“Program offices typically aim to speak with one voice,” Goldstein said in an email to Youth Services Insider. “But research and evaluation findings are what they are.”
She pointed out that Russell Vought, Trump’s current director of the Office of Management and Budget who served in that same role during the first term, voiced support for keeping research work separate. In a memo to executive branch leaders sent in 2020, he wrote:
“While stakeholders have an important role in identifying evaluation priorities, the implementation of evaluation activities, including how evaluators are selected and operate, should be appropriately insulated from political and other undue influences that may affect their objectivity, impartiality, and professional judgement.”
Other critics of the change said it opens up the work currently overseen by OPRE — which is largely to make and manage grants to research and evaluation contractors and other partners — to cuts and influencing.
“Under this restructuring, we expect only mandated research will continue—and even that work will now require direct approval from political appointees, compromising the scientific independence that gives evaluation findings their credibility and utility,” said Data Foundation CEO Nick Hart and Results for America CEO Michele Jolin, in a joint statement issued on Friday.
Emily Putnam-Hornstein, a researcher and professor of social work at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, was skeptical that the new structure would present new influences. She said her view is that “research priorities are always somewhat political. And as much as that is true, I don’t mind that the research funding that goes out is more closely tied to other grantmaking activities in a given administration. Even if those are not my priorities.”
Others have expressed to Youth Services Insider a more esoteric fear: that while nothing in the restructure implies the cancellation of ongoing work, it could be coming. And going forward, there are certain programs at ACF where Congress has not imprinted a monetary requirement to invest in research and evaluation, for example the Child Care Development. Last year, the administration cancelled 10 OPRE grants focused on research about child care and early childhood programs.
The joint statement from Data Foundation and Results for America also questions whether the restructuring is “consistent with congressional intent,” given that appropriations for fiscal 2026 support the current function of OPRE.