Governing

Urban Institute researchers evaluate federal, state, and local government programs and policies. Early on, we pioneered performance-management techniques government agencies still use to evaluate and improve public services, from economic development to garbage collection. And now we're adapting those strategies for the nonprofit sector—at home and abroad.

Big changes in government lay at the heart of our two most ambitious past projects, Changing Domestic Priorities and Assessing the New Federalism—the first examining the broad policy shifts of the "Reagan Revolution" and the second analyzing welfare reform as states' assumed more...