The Federal Housing Choice Voucher Program: Case Study of a Revenue Neutral Approach to Using Evidence

The brief details how the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) used evidence to improve its Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program in a revenue-neutral way. It explains what the HCV program is trying to achieve in terms of outcomes, what theories and evidence HUD used to identify ways to improve the program, and what policy levers HUD used to implement changes once they were identified. The brief also offers a number of recommendations for other agencies looking to start similar initiatives in their own fields.

This case study is the first in a new series of publications that focus on how policymakers can better use evidence to improve the lives of children, youth and their families. This series follows the Forum’s recent report “Managing for Success: Strengthening the Federal Infrastructure for Evidence-Based Policymaking,” which included a number of recommendations for how policymakers could better coordinate and strengthen the use of evidence across the federal government. The first case study focuses on the third set of recommendations from that report: focusing on revenue-neutral approaches to scaling the use of evidence.