The assistance PIH provides to low-income families encompasses three broad program areas: public housing, which offers units for eligible tenants in properties generally owned and administered by state and local public housing agencies (PHA); tenant-based rental assistance, which provides vouchers that eligible households can use to rent houses or apartments in the private housing market; and Native American programs, which provide block grants and loan guarantees to tribal entities for housing development and assistance and housing-related services. Specific programs administered by PIH include, but are not limited to, the following: MTW Demonstration Program. HUD implemented the MTW demonstration program, which was authorized by the Omnibus Consolidated Rescissions and Appropriations Act of 1996, in 1999. The program is intended to give participating PHAs the flexibility to design and test innovative strategies for providing and administering housing assistance. The program has three statutory purposes: to reduce costs and achieve greater cost-effectiveness in federal housing expenditures, give families with children incentives to obtain employment and become self-sufficient, and increase housing choices for low-income families. To put in place the innovations intended under the program’s authorizing legislation, PHAs may request waivers of certain provisions in the United States Housing Act of 1937, as amended. For example, PHAs may combine the funding they are awarded annually from different programs—such as public housing capital funds, public housing operating funds, and voucher funds—into a single, authority-wide funding source. As of June 2015, 39 PHAs were participating through the end of their fiscal year 2018. FSS Program. FSS was authorized in 1990 to help families receiving vouchers or living in public housing become self-sufficient through case management and referrals to education, training, and other supportive services. HUD has historically received separate FSS appropriations for public housing residents and Housing Choice Voucher recipients, but Congress combined the appropriations in fiscal year 2014. PHAs use grant funds to pay program coordinators who link residents to the supportive services they need to achieve self-sufficiency. Families in the FSS program sign contracts with their PHAs requiring that all family members become independent of cash welfare assistance and that the head of the family seek and maintain employment. Voucher Program. The voucher program was authorized under Section 8 of the United States Housing Act of 1937, as amended. In recent years, the voucher program has helped provide affordable rental housing to about 2 million very low- or extremely low-income households annually. Approximately 2,400 PHAs administer the voucher program on HUD’s behalf. Under the program, an assisted household pays either 30 percent of its monthly adjusted income in rent or the PHA-established minimum rent (up to $50). The remainder of the rent—the difference between the lesser of the unit’s gross rent (rent plus utilities) or a local “payment standard” and the household’s payment—is paid through a HUD-subsidized “voucher.” The payment standard is based on the HUD-determined fair market rent for the locality, which HUD annually estimates for metropolitan and nonmetropolitan areas. Participating PHAs can set payment standards (that is, pay subsidies) of between 90 and 110 percent of the fair market rent for their areas. The voucher program is not an entitlement program. Therefore, the amount of budget authority Congress provides through annual appropriations limits the number of households that the program can assist. Historically, appropriations for the voucher program (or for other housing programs) have not been sufficient to assist all households that HUD identified as having worst-case housing needs—households with very low incomes that pay more than 50 percent of their incomes in rent, live in substandard housing, or both. IHBG Program. Native American tribes primarily receive assistance for low-income housing through the IHBG program under the Native American Housing Assistance and Self-Determination Act of 1996 (NAHASDA) program. NAHASDA reorganized the system of housing assistance that HUD provided to Native Americans by eliminating or incorporating several separate programs into a single block grant program—the IHBG program—and created the Title VI Loan Guarantee (Title VI) program to assist grant recipients with private market financing. HUD’s Office of Native American Programs within PIH administers NAHASDA. IHBG is a formula grant program, and participating tribes may choose to receive housing funds directly or through a tribally designated housing entity (TDHE) that administers the housing program on their behalf. As of January 2015, 566 federally recognized and 5 state-recognized Indian tribes with membership levels ranging from a few hundred to a few hundred thousand are eligible to receive IHBG funds annually to provide their members with adequate and affordable housing. Families eligible for NAHASDA-funded assistance must be low-income Indian families— those whose income does not exceed 80 percent of the area median income—residing on a reservation or in an Indian area. Pub. L. No. 104-330, 110 Stat. 4016 (1996) (codified, as amended, at 25 U.S.C. § 4101 et seq.). In our prior work on the MTW and FSS programs, we concluded that HUD could take additional steps to understand program outcomes. We made eight recommendations in our April 2012 report on the MTW program, seven of which have been implemented. We made two recommendations to HUD concerning FSS in a July 2013 report on self- sufficiency programs.recommendations. The following discussion addresses selected recommendations from these reports that focus on improving program assessment. (See app. I for a full list of the recommendations from these reports and their status.) In our April 2012 report on the MTW program, we identified a number of weaknesses that limited HUD’s ability to determine program outcomes as they related to statutory purposes. First, we found that guidance on reporting performance information did not emphasize the importance of accurate outcome-oriented information. We noted that PHAs participating in MTW (MTW agencies) reported annually on their activities, including efforts to reduce administrative costs and encourage residents to work. But the usefulness of this information was limited because it was not consistently outcome oriented. For example, for similar activities designed to promote family self-sufficiency, one MTW agency reported only the number of participants, which is generally considered an output, and another agency did not provide any performance information. To be consistent with the GPRA Modernization Act of 2010 (GPRAMA), we noted that HUD’s guidance on reporting performance information should indicate the importance of outcome-oriented information. Second, we reported in 2012 that HUD had not identified the performance data needed to assess the results of similar MTW activities across PHAs or of the program as a whole. Obtaining performance information from demonstration programs is critical, because the purpose of a demonstration is to test approaches to identify those that provide positive results. Since 2009 HUD had been requiring agencies to provide information on the impact of MTW activities, including benchmarks and metrics, in their annual MTW reports. We found that while these reports were informative, they did not lend themselves to quantitative analysis because the reporting requirements did not call for standardized data, such as the number of residents who found employment. Further, we found that HUD had not established performance indicators for MTW. According to GPRAMA, federal agencies should establish efficiency, output, and outcome indicators for each program activity as appropriate. Federal internal control standards also require the establishment of performance indicators. As we noted in 2012, specific performance indicators for the MTW program could be based on the three statutory purposes of the program. For example, agencies could report on the savings achieved (reducing costs). In light of these shortcomings, we recommended that HUD (1) improve its guidance to MTW agencies on providing performance information in their annual reports by requiring that such information be quantifiable and outcome oriented, (2) develop and implement a plan for quantitatively assessing the effectiveness of similar activities and the program as a whole, and (3) establish performance indicators for the program. HUD subsequently implemented all three of these recommendations. Specifically, in May 2013 HUD revised the reporting requirements for MTW agencies and began requiring them to report quantifiable and outcome-oriented information on MTW activities. Also, in 2015 HUD developed a five-step plan to quantitatively assess both the effectiveness of similar activities across agencies and the program as a whole. According to this plan, HUD will assign standard metrics for all of the implemented and proposed activities of each MTW agency and ensure that agencies conducting similar activities report annually on the same set of metrics. HUD has taken steps to implement this plan by, for example, issuing guidance to MTW agencies on how to assign the metrics to activities. Additionally, in 2013 HUD established standard measures that correlate with each of the statutory objectives of the MTW program. For each measure, HUD will be able to calculate quantitative results for the program as a whole and determine whether they are positive, neutral, or negative. Finally, we indicated in our 2012 report that while HUD had identified some lessons learned on an ad hoc basis, it did not have a systematic process in place for identifying them. As previously noted, obtaining impact information from demonstration programs is critical. Since 2000, HUD had been identifying some activities that could be replicated by other PHAs. For example, a HUD-sponsored contractor developed five case studies to describe issues and challenges involved in implementing MTW. However, these efforts had shortcomings. In most cases, the lessons learned were chosen based on the opinions of HUD or contracted staff and largely involved anecdotal (or qualitative) data rather than quantitative data. We reported in 2012 that because HUD had not developed criteria and a systematic process for identifying lessons learned, HUD was limited in its ability to promote useful practices for broader implementation.