Outcomes Review: Realigning Legislative Incentives

How might a state legislature shift from outputs to outcomes?

In the state capacity framework that underpins my work (and the work of the Recoding America Fund), it’s the fourth competency that confuses people. It makes sense that government needs the right people, focused on the right work, with purpose-fit systems (competencies 1, 2, and 3), so it naturally follows that we need civil service reform, procedural reform, and reform of how we build and buy technology. But when we say that it needs to operate in test-and-learn frameworks, brows wrinkle. For some, this evokes the practices of digital teams who employ build-measure-learn cycles as they implement interfaces to government programs. But test-and-learn isn’t limited to implementation – the point is that the whole system, from writing law to how programs operate, and everything in between, needs to constantly adjust based on accurate feedback about what’s working. So what do we really mean here?

An experiment out of the California legislature may provide an illustrative example. On Thursday, California Speaker of the Assembly Robert Rivas announced an intentional, structured process for evaluating whether the laws lawmakers pass actually do what they’re supposed to do. The program is called Outcomes Reviews, and it’s launching as a modest pilot in the state’s lower house, with the intention to look back at roughly 8-15 laws in 2026. By starting small, this initiative is hoping to test and learn how to build the muscle of test-and-learn, so to speak

The problem the Speaker’s office hopes to address is that California passes a lot of bills, but those bills aren’t necessarily solving the problems their authors are targeting. Between 2016 and 2022, for example, more than 100 bills to stimulate housing production were signed into California law, but even today permit numbers in the state have barely budged. This is the problem that sits at the heart of the Recoding America Fund’s work: government’s poor track record of delivering on policy intent.

Outcomes Reviews are an experiment in closing that gap. They’re essentially a process that starts with a legislator announcing that they’re going to review the outcomes of a bill they previously championed. The member coordinates with the relevant policy committee and identifies stakeholders who’ll be part of the work. Then, over the course of a legislative year, the legislator and their staff, working with committee experts and direct stakeholders, hold a series of roundtables and hearings. They listen to the people actually affected by the law. They dig into what’s working, what’s not, where implementation has stalled, where unintended consequences have emerged. Finally, they announce what they’ve learned and what they’re doing about it. This might be a fix-it bill, an executive action request, or public coverage celebrating the law’s success—whatever the evidence suggests is needed. The work helps close the feedback loop between policy intent and real world outcomes.

Since Speaker Rivas took the gavel, he’s been focused on shifting the focus of his chamber from the volume of legislation to meaningful outcomes that matter to Californians, starting with reducing the bill cap for each individual member from 50 to 35. But legislators introduce bills in part because doing so gets them attention. A known, predictable cadence of activity is built into the calendar. Press, stakeholders, and advocates all react to the steps in the process of how a bill becomes law (and many of those steps occur even if it doesn’t become law.) Attention gets you reelected. Passing a bill is the most well-worn, reliable path for members to that attention.

Outcomes Reviews are designed to be that alternative path. By offering the same sequence of public moments—announcement, engagement with stakeholders and advocates, deliverables with media attention—they provide a second legislative rhythm—one focused not on passing new laws, but on making existing ones work. If it sounds like oversight, it is, but less reactive and less outrage-driven. The structure is designed for more sustained, thoughtful inquiry than is common in the usual hearings in response to high-profile catastrophes, which can often devolve into a blame game.

The announcement from Rivas’s office provides a few examples, starting with AB 2011, authored by Assemblymember Buffy Wicks and known as the Middle Class Housing Act. It was enacted in 2022 to make it easier to build affordable and mixed-income housing projects in cities and metro areas where shops or offices are already allowed. Wicks will use an Outcomes Review to dig into whether the law is actually achieving its purpose. She’ll hold hearings with developers, city officials, and community members. She’ll examine whether the reforms are sufficient, whether there are unintended barriers, whether the problem the law was meant to solve is actually being solved. And then she’ll announce what she’s learned and what comes next. That announcement will hopefully get media coverage. Advocates should engage with it. Her constituents should see her following through on the problem she seeks to solve, not moving on to bill number 36.

Assemblymember Jacqui Irwin is set to dig into the results of Assembly Bill 488, enacted in 2021 to ensure charitable donations have their intended impact. Irwin will use an Outcomes Review to examine how the law is functioning and, specifically, how it’s serving victims of disasters like the Los Angeles firestorms. This isn’t a new bill, but it comes with the same political infrastructure—the press conference, the stakeholder engagement, the announcement of solutions—that makes introducing a bill attractive.

AB 457 was enacted in 2025 with the goal of building more affordable farmworker housing within 15 miles of farm or grazing land in the Central Valley. Its sponsor, Assemblymember Esmeralda Soria, had this to say about why she’s piloting an OR.

“Our constituents deserve to know whether the laws we pass are being implemented and are effective. They should know how these laws are working or not working and impacting their communities. The Outcomes Review tool will ensure transparency, oversight, and accountability at a time our constituents look to us for solutions. With these new outcome review tools, our constituents will know whether more affordable homes are being built for California farmworkers, as AB 457 clearly lays out.”

Appropriately, the Speaker’s office is treating this new initiative as an experiment. There are many questions they may be hoping to answer: Do members have the bandwidth and expertise to do this well? Can legislators actually benefit—politically and reputationally—from doing this backward-looking work, or will the culture of “move on to the next bill” persist? Do advocates and the press actually engage with Outcomes Reviews the way they do with new bills? Do the reviews actually identify problems? Do the solutions get adopted? Do laws improve as a result?

My big question is whether this mechanism allows for the deeper kind of inquiry that gets at the underlying issues in bureaucracies. Most oversight increases risk aversion because it tends to point fingers at administrative agencies for implementation failures and it tends to happen when something has gone wrong in a highly visible way, making outrage the natural response. Outrage discourages public servants from trying new things; you may get yelled at but you can’t get in significant trouble if you’ve played by the book. A deeper dive at a less heated moment and over a sustained period has a greater chance of surfacing the real barriers these public servants face. If legislators really listen, they’ll hear the things that they need to do to speed implementation in agencies, things like making it easier to hire the right people, to reduce unnecessary procedural burdens, and to make it possible to build and buy the systems that administer programs. That’s critical work our legislators should be focusing on.

Kudos to Speaker Rivas for this bold experiment. I look forward to seeing what happens as the California Assembly tests the program, documents what happens, and learns what’s hard and what works. Perhaps there will be tweaks and adjustments, and hopefully it will eventually merit a broader roll out to all 80 Assembly members. A future in which Outcomes Reviews are a large part of what the press, advocates, and constituents expect from their legislators — and we meaningfully close the loop between lawmaking and implementation – is a better future.

But California doesn’t need to be the only test bed. Other states can, and should, try their own versions of this. Not every state is the bill mill California has become, but every state, and of course our federal government, needs to care less about passing laws and more about making good on the promises they represent.