Summary: Advancing Evidence Based Social Policies through Intergovernmental Data Sharing Partnerships

In response to the challenge of addressing complex social problems with limited resources, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and Congress have called for evidence-based initiatives to facilitate program evaluation and policy research. In 2016, Congress established the Commission on Evidence Based Policy Making to make recommendations on how to accomplish this. While Congress considers mechanisms to link data from federal agencies on a national level, there is much that the federal government can learn from the use of integrated data systems (IDS) at the state and local levels.