Field Digital Agenda Draft 0.1
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Priority 04

Align funding, procurement, and oversight with delivery

Change funding, procurement, and oversight together so government can buy, operate, and continuously improve digital services.

This priority advances
Incentives for outcomes

The case

Delivery improves when the rules reward it.

A delivery team cannot work iteratively if its budget only funds a fixed project, its contract locks in a solution before users are understood, and its oversight process rewards completing the original plan. Hiring capable people without changing how they buy, fund, and manage work leaves them constrained. These rules together determine what public institutions are able and willing to change.

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The alternative is not less accountability. It is accountability for whether money, technology, and policy produce the intended public result. Funders, procurement teams, legislators, and oversight bodies need enough implementation knowledge to distinguish responsible adaptation from failure, while protecting fair competition, public integrity, and people’s rights.

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What the agenda asks

Fund learning. Buy capability. Review results.

  1. 01

    Fund enduring capabilities with visible outcomes

    Organize funding around services and the teams responsible for them, including discovery, maintenance, and improvement. Give teams room to adjust within clear boundaries, with regular evidence-based decisions about what to continue, change, or stop.

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  2. 02

    Buy in ways that preserve learning and competition

    Start procurement with the problem and testable service outcomes. Use appropriately sized contracts, demonstrations, and delivery milestones; require data portability and maintainable interfaces. Build public commercial and contract-management capacity, and document how purchasing choices affect delivery after award.

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  3. 03

    Make oversight close the loop on implementation

    Bring operational evidence, frontline experience, and affected communities into budget reviews, hearings, and audits. Ask whether the policy or service is working, identify the causes of failure, and track corrective action rather than treating plan compliance or spending alone as success.

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Across the field

Selected examples

These illustrate the priority, not a census. They include proposals, pilots, current resources, and completed work with lessons to reuse. Sources were reviewed on the dates shown; status may have changed. Inclusion implies neither endorsement of the Agenda nor a funding recommendation. Use “Suggest an edit” on a card to correct its status or description.

01
Open Contracting

Operating and scaling

A common data standard for understanding public contracts

Open Contracting Partnership stewards the Open Contracting Data Standard, a non-proprietary model for publishing information from planning through contract implementation. Documentation, tools, and a support team help governments make contracting data comparable and reusable for monitoring, analysis, and public scrutiny.

Why selected: Shows a maintained shared standard that governments can adopt without a single platform.

Adoption: Implemented by more than 50 governments; a shared standard, not a procurement platform

The count indicates adoption. Effects on competition, purchasing, or delivery require separate evidence.

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Purpose-fit digital infrastructureIncentives for outcomes

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Open Contracting Partnership: Data standard and implementation support

Sources reviewed

02
Niskanen

Research and policy development

Budgeting around enduring delivery capabilities

Niskanen’s capability-based budgeting work gives government leaders a way to connect spending, staffing, contracts, and technology to the outcomes they are responsible for. Its practical roadmap starts with a bounded portfolio and tests whether the resulting model helps leaders make real resource decisions.

Why selected: Connects budgeting decisions to enduring public delivery capacity.

Activity: A practical roadmap grounded in federal implementation experience

The roadmap captures a method; the signal does not establish its adoption or results.

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Incentives for outcomes

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Niskanen: Capability-based budgeting roadmap

Sources reviewed

03
Partners for Public Good NASPO ABA

Research and policy development

Updating the legal framework behind public purchasing

Partners for Public Good is providing project management, legal research, and steering-committee support to the Model Procurement Code revision alongside NASPO and the American Bar Association. The work brings current procurement challenges into a framework intended to support strategic purchasing while preserving competition, transparency, and accountability.

Why selected: Addresses the legal framework that shapes public purchasing choices.

Activity: A national model-code revision informed by state and local procurement practice

Model-code development is underway; adoption and changes to purchasing practice need follow-up.

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Incentives for outcomes

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Partners for Public Good: Model Procurement Code Revision Project

Sources reviewed

04
Results for America

Operating

Making evidence part of budgeting and grantmaking

Results for America provides evidence-based spending guides for federal, state, county, education, and workforce leaders. The guides connect budgeting, grantmaking, and purchasing decisions to evidence about what improves outcomes, giving officials practical approaches that reach beyond technology procurement alone.

Why selected: Offers practical guidance for linking spending choices to evidence.

Activity: Practical guides connecting evidence to public resource decisions

The guides are practical resources; use in decisions and resulting outcomes need separate evidence.

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Incentives for outcomes

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Results for America: Spending guides

Sources reviewed

05
California Assembly Oregon House

Piloting and evaluation

Reviewing whether enacted laws deliver their intended results

California’s Assembly has completed a pilot year of Outcomes Reviews, examining implementation with committees and affected communities. Oregon’s House is testing a related approach. POPVOX’s account documents the emerging practice and what other legislatures can learn about staffing, scope, and following findings into corrective action.

Why selected: Illustrates how legislatures can revisit implementation after a law passes.

Activity: California’s pilot examined 14 laws; Oregon’s 2026 effort is still being tested

The number of laws reviewed describes activity; it does not establish resulting policy or service improvements.

The California pilot was completed; Oregon was described as developing.

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Incentives for outcomes

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POPVOX: After the Bill Passes California Assembly: Pilot completion announcement Oregon Legislature: Outcomes Reviews launch

Sources reviewed

What could happen next

Possible next moves

These illustrate ways to advance the priority, including development, adoption, and sustained operation. They invite discussion and support; they are not an announced grant program.

Adoption and sustained operation

Readiness: Exploring

Help governments adopt a durable product operating model

Work with a small number of government teams on a service they choose, improving delivery while establishing public product ownership, decision rights, mixed career and temporary roles, live-work coaching, and targeted procurement changes. Document what remains after outside support and what another government would need to adapt the approach.

What would help

Find a few government teams with a live service problem, then design time-bound support with existing providers and practitioners that leaves ownership and evidence inside government. Explore this opportunity

Development and testing

Readiness: Exploring

Startup accelerator for public-sector infrastructure

Explore an accelerator for teams building foundational products and services public agencies repeatedly need. Pair patient support with government design partners and help teams navigate procurement, adoption, and long-term stewardship.

What would help

Find government design partners, an operator, and funders to choose a first cohort around a defined public need and test whether the model helps products reach adoption. Explore this opportunity

Development and testing

Readiness: Exploring

Make privacy rules executable

Explore a bounded privacy-as-code demonstration in one real government data-sharing workflow. Translate human-approved rules on authority, purpose, access, minimization, and retention into testable controls, then publish safe tests and evidence of how they work. Encoding a rule also exposes legal and policy interpretations that people must resolve.

What would help

Find an agency data-sharing use case and bring together legal, privacy, program, engineering, and oversight expertise to design and test a first implementation. Explore this opportunity

Help move this priority

See a gap or a way forward?

Tell us about a need this priority overlooks, even if you do not have a project to propose. Or add work already underway, with a public source. Editors review suggestions before publication.

Tell us what’s missing

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