Priority 04
Fund capable teams, learning, measurable outcomes, and responsible iteration rather than static plans and prescribed solutions.
The case
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. These are not separate back-office problems. Together they determine what public institutions are able and willing to change.
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.
What the agenda asks
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.
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 contract-management capacity so accountability continues after award.
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.
Across the field
This is a curated view of active work that advances the priority, not a claim that every organization shown has endorsed the full Agenda.
Operating and scaling
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.
Implemented by more than 50 governments; a shared standard, not a procurement platform
Research and policy development
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.
A practical roadmap grounded in federal implementation experience
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Niskanen: Capability-based budgeting roadmapResearch and policy development
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.
A national model-code revision informed by state and local procurement practice
Operating
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.
Practical guides connecting evidence to public resource decisions
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Results for America: Spending guidesPiloting and evaluation
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.
California’s pilot examined 14 laws; Oregon’s 2026 effort is still being tested
What could happen next
These are possible next moves, not promises. Each one names what it could unlock and what is still needed to move it forward.
Exploring
Explore an accelerator for teams building foundational products and services that public agencies repeatedly need, pairing patient support with government design partners and help navigating the public market.
What would help
Identify an operator, funders, and government partners who could shape a first cohort. Explore this opportunityExploring
Explore a privacy-as-code demonstration in a real government data-sharing workflow. Translate approved rules on authority, purpose, access, data minimization, and retention into testable controls, then publish a reusable reference implementation and evidence of how it works.
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 opportunityHelp move this priority
The Workbench will provide a way to suggest work, correct a description, or help shape an opportunity. Recoding America will keep the public view selective and coherent.
Help shape the Agenda