Recommendation: To improve the reliability and usefulness of program evaluations for agency program and budget decisions, the Chief Executive Officer of MCC, the Administrator of USAID, the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State, and the Secretary of Health and Human Services (in cooperation with State's Office of the U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator and Health Diplomacy) should each develop a plan for improving the quality of evaluations for the programs included in our review, focusing on areas where our analysis has shown the largest areas for potential improvement.

Agency: Department of Agriculture
Status: Open

Comments: In response to the Foreign Aid Transparency and Accountability Act (FATAA), the USDA Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) - Food Assistance Division (FAD) updated its Monitoring and Evaluation policy in February 2019. In addition, in May 2019, USDA provided GAO with a draft evaluation quality checklist (EQC) that the FAS - FAD will use to review draft evaluations. The checklist includes specific questions about the evaluation's design, methodology, findings, and conclusions, among other items. USDA FAS-FAD indicated that the criteria used in the checklist were developed in alignment with our report, the quality checklist developed for an assessment of USAID evaluations, and its own internal criteria. As of July 2019, the EQC was in internal clearance. In November 2019, USDA stated that it was piloting a draft of the EQC, however, a re-organization within USDA had affected the timetable for implementing it. USDA stated that it would wait to finalize the EQC until it was able to potentially adjust it to reflect any new duties or priorities under the agency re-organization. We will continue to follow-up with USDA FAS-FAD to determine whether the checklist has been finalized and implemented.

Recommendation: To better ensure that the evaluation findings reach their intended audiences and are available to facilitate incorporating lessons learned into future program design or budget decisions, the Chief Executive Officer of MCC should adjust MCC evaluation practices to make evaluation reports available within the timeframe required by MCC guidance.

Agency: Millennium Challenge Corporation
Status: Open

Comments: MCC concurred with the recommendation but noted that its then-forthcoming revised policy on monitoring and evaluation would state that "MCC expects to make each interim and final evaluation report publicly available as soon as practical after receiving the draft report." This revised guidance did not set a specific time frame for the reviews. In a letter provided to GAO in May 2017, MCC stated that it had initiated a re-design of its evaluation monitoring information system to provide MCC with detailed timelines of each component of the evaluation review and publication process. MCC provided additional information regarding actions taken in follow-up to our recommendations in April 2018. In December 2018, MCC provided GAO with a list of evaluation reports that had been released in calendar years 2017 and 2018. Of the 18 reports that were released in 2017 and 2018, 9 were released in six or fewer months after the date of the report and 9 were released more than six months after the date of the report. These review times represented only a modest improvement over what we found at the time of our report. In our report, we found that 6 of the 16 reports we examined were released within six months of MCC receiving the report, and 10 were released more than six months after MCC received the report. We requested an updated list of evaluation reports from MCC in January 2020 and will continue to review the timelines for release of reports.

Recommendation: To better ensure that the evaluation findings reach their intended audiences and are available to facilitate incorporating lessons learned into future program design or budget decisions, the Secretary of Agriculture should implement guidance and procedures for making FAS evaluations available online and searchable on a single website that can be accessed by the general public.

Agency: Department of Agriculture
Status: Open

Comments: In February 2019, the USDA Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) - Food Assistance Division (FAD)'s updated Monitoring and Evaluation policy required that all final versions of USDA evaluation reports be made publicly available on the FAS website and that evaluators provide a copy of the evaluation reports that is free of personally identifiable and proprietary information. As of May 2019, USDA has published seven non-sensitive evaluations on the publicly available Development Experience Clearinghouse (DEC) website. As of July 2019, FAS was drafting internal standard operating procedures (SOPs) for making future and past evaluations publicly available on the DEC. In November 2019, USDA stated that it was piloting a draft of the SOPs, however, a re-organization within USDA had affected the timetable for implementing them. USDA stated that it would wait to finalize the SOPs until it was able to potentially adjust them to reflect any new duties or priorities under the agency re-organization. We will continue to follow-up with USDA FAS-FAD to determine whether the SOPs have been finalized and implemented.