The process is secretive, which naturally fuels the fears of bureaucrats. Simply labeled "Program Review", this initiative from the Canadian government forces each department to assess, on a cyclical basis, all its activities, and identify which ones must go. No way around it: at each review, at least five percent of current spending must be freed up in order to be reinvested. To either guard or target initiatives, evaluation reports have become a prominent tool. And thanks to a revamped evaluation policy, all activities within each department shall be evaluated on a cyclical basis, providing ample evidence when engaging in a program review. Not surprisingly, as its role shifts, and its actions become more consequential, program evaluation is being scrutinized. This presentation uses the program review experiment to explore the set of assumptions about public policy that drive program evaluation, and assess its impact on the function of evaluation. #GovernmentEvaluation #2011Conference