The Biden-Harris administration has now released several executive orders related to racial equity, calling on all of government to plan and execute actions in service of racial equity.

The latest of these executive orders, Further Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities through the Federal Government, released in February 2023, offers more guidance on the administration’s goals of embedding equity in government-wide processes, including the creation of annual equity action plans. Over the past months the Urban Institute has analyzed 24 federal-agency equity action plans generated in response to the administration’s Executive Order on Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities through the Federal Government, released in January 2021.

To review the agencies’ plans, analysts in Urban’s Office of Race and Equity Research developed a rubric to describe how the plans addressed 14 domains, including drivers of inequity, program or policy changes to incorporate equity, and implementation planning.

We categorized agencies’ plans based on type of equity promised or delivered:

• Procedural equity relates to the fairness of processes, often in terms of access to services.
• Distributional equity relates to resource allocation and procurement that responds to a history of unequal treatment and outcomes.
• Structural equity relates to designing policies and systems to minimize obstacles and change incentives in ways that promote equity.

We found that most of the plans included at least one major proposed action for each of these types of equity. But overall, the plans focused more on procedural than distributional or structural equity proposals, which we suspect is because the 2021 executive order provided more guidance on procedural matters, such as eligibility, than on measurement of outcomes resulting from changes in eligibility rules.

Across the largest agencies we reviewed, plans generally focused on early wins and foundational tasks or tactics. Ideally, the next phase of equity-focused activities would address system-level strategies such as the following:

• pursuing more distributional equity (e.g., reallocating resources) and/or structural equity (through policy change)
• focusing more on outcomes (e.g., closing employment gaps by a certain percentage) than changes in process (i.e., procedural equity)
• reducing barriers to access and participation facing certain target populations by identifying specific strategies or program remedies to reach nonparticipants
• improving data collection and initiating new analysis of existing data to better understand the extent of challenges in reaching underserved populations

With these next steps, federal agencies could move from the equity action plans toward equity accountability plans—plans that would hold specific units or people within agencies responsible for improving outcomes related to the systems-level strategies they plan to enact.