A Bureaucratic Shakeup Threatens Future Child Care Research

On February 10, an internal memo written by Assistant Secretary for Family Support Alex Adams announced that the Administration of Children and Families (ACF) would restructure the research and evaluation operations of its Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation (OPRE).The memo states that a realignment plan will be created that transfers the research and evaluation activities out of OPRE and to the individual program offices overseeing early childhood, child welfare, and family assistance. 

Under the change, which still has yet to be publicly announced, the number of OPRE staff would shrink from 120 to about 20 as former OPRE staffers are reassigned to program offices they previously oversaw. The announcement has sparked an outcry from dozens of research institutions and nonprofit organizations that warn that the change “threatens to destroy one of the federal government’s most effective and respected evaluation units.” Notably, the coalition letter singles out the Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF) as being “particularly vulnerable” since research investment is not mandated by Congress in the authorizing statute.

OPRE, which oversees over $150 million in annual grants and contracts, employs 120 federal staff and conducts research across nine program areas, including child care, home visiting, and Head Start. Established in 1995, OPRE has acted as the research and evaluation arm of ACF for over thirty years. Simply put, OPRE works to provide evidence that tells Congress, the administration, and the general public which ACF programs are working well and which aren’t. If you’ve ever relied on information contained in a Head Start Impact Study or the National Survey of Early Care and Education, then you’ve benefited from the expertise and knowledge of OPRE staff.

The changes outlined in the Adams memo are concerning for a couple of reasons. First, moving research and evaluation functions into program offices risks compromising scientific independence. “In my view, it lowers the status of research and evaluation within the agency,” says Naomi Goldstein, who worked at OPRE from 2001-2022 and was deputy assistant secretary for planning, research and evaluation. Goldstein further explained: “Moving staff from a central research and evaluation office into program offices means moving those staff to a lower level in the hierarchy. Instead of reporting to a senior civil servant who is dedicated to promoting and protecting quality and objectivity, they will report to program directors for whom research and evaluation are likely to be secondary interests.” At ACF, those program directors are political appointees, raising the possibility of political calculations influencing which topics to study and which studies to publicly release.

It’s worth noting that none other than Russell Vought, the current director of the Office of Management and Budget who served in that same role during the first term, previously voiced support for keeping research work removed from political influence. In a 2020 memo to executive branch leaders, 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.”  

Because only some of the research performed by OPRE is mandated by statute, it’s now unclear whether important discretionary research will continue under a structure in which political appointees have more direct control over research priorities. For purposes of early education research, it’s helpful to look at differences in the statutes authorizing Head Start and the Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF). The Head Start Act states that, “The Secretary shall carry out a continuing program of research, demonstration, and evaluation activities….” (emphasis added) and also requires the HHS Secretary to appoint an independent panel of experts to carry out the National Head Start Impact Study. 

The language contained in the statute authorizing CCDF is much less prescriptive when it comes to research and evaluation, however. It states that, “The Secretary may reserve ½ of 1 percent of the amount appropriated under this subchapter for each fiscal year to conduct research and demonstration activities, as well as periodic external independent evaluations of the impact of the program….” (emphasis added). This statutory language is the reason child care research has been called “particularly vulnerable” in the context of the OPRE changes, and why some fear that only mandated research will continue. If that does occur, the ECE field and the general public could lose the important information contained in publications such as the National Survey of Early Care and Education (NSECE). “It’s really a groundbreaking survey. There’s never been anything like it before. It’s a national level survey of the characteristics of child care and the people who use it and the staff who provide it,” says Goldstein on the importance of the survey. When Congress and ACF are making decisions about subsidy eligibility thresholds, copayment structures, and provider payment rates, NSECE data on what families actually pay for care and what providers charge serves as the empirical foundation. 

Last year, the administration cancelled 10 OPRE grants focused on child care and early education research, including grants focused on improving the mental health of the early education workforce and evaluating access and participation in universal pre-K programs. With the recently announced changes at OPRE, the fear is that lawmakers, researchers, and parents will lose access to important information about the effectiveness of key federal ECE programs. The worst case scenario is not abstract: political appointees decide which questions are worth asking, inconvenient findings go unreleased, and the country loses the ability to distinguish which programs are actually helping children from those that merely appear to. Prior to the first NSECE in 2012, the United States had gone more than twenty years without a nationally representative survey of child care supply and demand. Without a national survey, policymakers during those decades had no reliable way to know whether what was true in one state or city reflected the child care landscape across the country. Dismantling OPRE risks returning us to that condition, at precisely the moment when evidence of what works in early childhood is most needed to guide consequential policy decisions.