The White House recently released the latest round of equity action plans, offering new insights about how more than 20 major federal agencies intend to incorporate into their services fairness in outcomes for all, including rural America, people with disabilities, communities of color, and other populations that have experienced systemic exclusion from government services. (These plans focus on the delivery of equitable outcomes to communities; internal agency hiring or diversity and inclusion efforts were not primary areas of focus.)

While the 2022 plans focused largely on procedural actions—mainly improving access to programs for underserved and excluded populations—our early analysis shows that the 2023 plans focus more on distributional and structural actions, such as allocating federal dollars and updating program design and delivery to improve outcomes. The administration also released a progress report (PDF) summarizing their equity accomplishments.

The plans for 2023–24 showcase different approaches to creating tangible outcomes across the government-wide goals of economic justice, health equity, housing justice, and community investment. To better understand patterns across these plans, we developed a text mining approach to identify commonalities in the text of the 2023 equity action plans. We searched for how frequently key words appeared in the released plans to identify patterns as well as new processes, initiatives, collaborations, and performance measurements. We found five key trends across the 2023 plans:

1. Allocating federal funds equitably

The most frequent and notable discussion of fairness relates to distributional equity—the allocation of federal funds via grants, loans, and contracts. At least eight agencies are actively disbursing billions of dollars from major pieces of infrastructure legislation—including the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act—as well as completing disbursement and evaluation of other major pieces of legislation, such as the American Rescue Plan Act. Some of the distribution goals listed in the equity action plans fall under “procurement,” which is the process the government uses to acquire services via competitive bids. Other distributional goals relate to equitable grantmaking practices—including advance notice time, clearer review criteria, and outreach to communities that qualify for funds but may not yet have experience navigating the federal bureaucracy.

2. Prioritizing interagency collaboration

Government agencies typically work in silos, creating a structural challenge. The new plans focus explicitly on cross-agency collaborations, including interagency workstreams that are designed to serve all populations more comprehensively. Some departments list as many as 12 distinct collaborators, and all departments listed the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the Department of Transportation, and the Department of Energy.

3. Increasing community engagement in program design, research and decisionmaking

To sustain initiatives or reforms, the people affected need to have input in design and decisionmaking. This year’s plans include a dedicated section on community engagement, describing more accessible ways for agencies to hear from the public, designing programs responsive to community needs, conducting participatory research, and using advisory boards and other engagement and transparency structures. The Department of Energy, for example, aims to establish a department-wide community engagement strategic framework, including workshops for tribal nations, underserved communities, remote communities, project developers, and labor unions, to help design and assess Community Benefits Plans. In addition, some departments set up external commissions via the Federal Advisory Committee Act, and the commissions of the Departments of Transportation and Agriculture (PDF) recently issued their recommendations for equitable practices as well.

4. Creating tangible progress metrics

Because outcomes need to be measured, each plan includes a dedicated section on the metrics the department will use to track their progress. This inclusion is an important step forward and an improvement over the 2022 plans. Metrics can demonstrate tangible steps toward goals that people can see in their day-to-day lives, such as the number of businesses connected to the internet, the number of jobs created, or wage growth. Encouragingly, most agencies reported near- to medium-term metrics (called outputs by some agencies) and longer-term metrics (called outcomes by some agencies), showing a more robust approach to evaluation as well. Government-wide long-term goals and outcomes, such as closing the homeownership gap and reducing maternal mortality, corresponded to a set of near-term progress measures in agencies like the Department of Housing and Urban Development and HHS.

5. Improving customer experience

In our comparison of the 2023 updates with 2022 plans, we observe that a common approach to procedural equity included improving customer experience—such as shorter wait times when calling a government office for help or waiting for a service. Reducing these types of administrative burdens can enhance equity as the people who need these services the most may have the least time and resources to navigate bureaucratic processes. The Department of Veteran’s Affairs, for example, instituted automatic eligibility for health care benefits for which veterans already qualify. At the Department of Transportation, they described efforts to improve the airline flying experience of people with disabilities, taking actions to ensure that wheelchairs are not damaged or that people are not injured when transferring into an aircraft. (The agency also pursued structural changes and issued clearer regulatory guidance to airlines pertaining to the responsibility of transit authorities to safeguard assistive devices.)

Our review suggests that federal agencies are trying to scale and institutionalize fairness and redress inequities. Transparency and performance-tracking strategies can enhance service delivery by government and are among the primary strategies for government innovation. Future Urban reports will summarize and analyze these strategies in more detail. For now, these five trends indicate that federal agencies are working to make fairness more concrete and visible.