A Wish With a Budget
I have watched this happen enough times that I can see it coming. An organization announces a program. The activities are specific. The outcomes are aspirational. Somewhere between the two is a gap that nobody named out loud before the money started moving.
The latest example is agricultural, but the pattern is not.
In December 2025, the USDA launched a $700 million Regenerative Pilot Program through its Natural Resources Conservation Service. Farmers who enroll conduct a whole-farm assessment, adopt at least one primary practice from a list of fifteen, and agree to soil health testing at the start and end of a five-year contract. Outcomes are tracked at the farm level against resource concern thresholds.
That is what the program does.
What the program claims is something else. The stated purpose ties the work to reducing chronic disease and improving community prosperity, under the banner of Make America Healthy Again. The Department of Health and Human Services is separately funding research on the connection between regenerative agriculture and public health.
Read that again. The research on the connection is happening after the program launched.
A soil test on a farm in Iowa cannot tell you whether chronic disease is declining. Those are different scales of claim. Farm-level resource data cannot be aggregated into population-level health outcomes without a set of intermediate steps that this program does not articulate. The measurement that exists is fine for what it measures. It cannot do the work the claim is asking it to do.
The missing floor
The step that would at least begin to bridge the scales is a theory of change. I do not mean a document. I mean a conversation. It is the conversation where someone says out loud: we believe that if farmers do this, then that will happen on the farm, which might contribute to the other thing at the community level, because of these intermediate mechanisms we can name and, where possible, test.
I want to be honest about what a theory of change is and what it is not. It is an abstraction. It cannot capture every condition, every feedback loop, every way one outcome might shape another. It will not tell you whether the causal arrow runs forward or back, or whether two outcomes are really one outcome in disguise. Causal loop diagrams try to hold all of that and collapse under their own weight. A theory of change lives in the tension between specifying everything and specifying nothing, and it chooses to specify the bridge.
Which is why it matters here. A theory of change is not the whole answer. It is the floor. It is the least strict requirement to at least try to do what you are claiming. It forces you to name your assumptions so they can be examined, argued with, and, where the data allows, tested.
Anything less than that is not a program. It is a wish with a budget.
This is not a piece about farming
The pattern I am describing is not unique to agriculture. It shows up any time a program’s activities operate at one scale and its claims operate at another, and no one in the design room does the work of naming the bridging assumptions. I have seen it in education funding. I have seen it in public health initiatives. I have seen it in workforce programs and housing pilots. The particulars change. The shape does not.
The organizations that end up doing the work are the ones who hit the activity targets, file the outcome reports, and wonder later why the numbers do not add up to the thing everyone said they wanted. They did not design the gap. They inherited it.
The first conversation
The next time you see a big check attached to a big claim, the first question is not what should we measure. The first question is whether anyone in the room can say out loud, in one sentence, how this work is supposed to get to that outcome. If nobody can, no measurement framework will save it.
That sentence is the floor. It is the first conversation, not the last.
Anthralytic is a strategy and evaluation studio helping mission-driven organizations clarify and amplify their impact. We build the tools and conversations that help teams name what they are doing, why they believe it will work, and how they will know.
