In recent decades, policy research has focused on proposed and newly developed government programs and has tended to neglect concrete analysis of continuing ones.

Joseph J. and Violet Jacobs Scholar Douglas J. Besharov

AEI has revived its Evaluative Studies publication series to redress that imbalance. The series aims to enhance understanding of government programs and to prompt continual review of their performance. In the 1970s, AEI published evaluative studies on government activity in a variety of fields, including agriculture, energy, housing, and transportation. Each study focused on a specific federal program and analyzed its costs and efficiency, the extent to which it was achieving its stated goals, and the principal alternative means–public and private–for reaching those goals.

The first publication of the restored series is Rethinking WIC: An Evaluation of the Women, Infants, and Children Program, by AEI's Douglas J. Besharov and Peter Germanis. The federal government established the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) in 1972 as a response to the increasing need to eliminate health risks and higher medical costs for low-income women and children by improving their nutritional intake. Through the use of grants paid to agencies that would administer WIC services, needy individuals received supplemental food and nutrition education.

Although the WIC program is generally well regarded, Besharov and Germanis argue that it has developed some important shortcomings. The program has expanded its scope beyond the truly disadvantaged, even though new participants are unlikely to need or benefit from the services it provides. Moreover, WIC debuted at a time when hunger was the most pressing social problem for needy Americans; since then, heaviness has superseded hunger as our most serious nutrition-related health problem.

Besharov and Germanis recommend that data on the results of WIC be more thoroughly examined, as findings are currently subject to severe problems of selection and simultaneity bias. In addition, much of the available data are based on the program as it existed more than a decade ago and thus do not reflect the composition of its caseload today.

The authors suggest that the program could be more effective if it targeted WIC benefits to more needful families, selectively intensified existing benefits, added a focus on preventing obesity, served children over age four, increased directive counseling, and used alternative service providers. Expansions of the program can be worthwhile, the authors say, as long as they are more carefully targeted than current services.

Current plans for the series include publications on an interesting range of government programs. Sean Nicholson will evaluate Medicare hospital subsidies in an upcoming study, and David Kaserman and Andrew Barnett will assess the economic failings of the organ procurement system in the United States. Richard Geddes will evaluate the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970, which created the structure of the current, more independent U.S. postal service. AEI's Marvin Kosters and Brent Mast will publish a study on the results of Title I education programs, which aim to help disadvantaged children develop reading and math skills. 

With this series of publications, AEI's Evaluative Studies program seeks to change the way the government approaches the maintenance of its established programs.