Since its introduction in 1983, the Employment and Training Choices program had been widely applauded as a creative response to the problem of chronic welfare. State leaders like Gov. Michael Dukakis took every opportunity to celebrate the program’s success, but these claims were based on government-sponsored research that had generally found in the numbers exactly what the government wanted to hear, and had failed to ask the tough questions necessary to produce an accurate assessment. Economist June O’Neill, unhampered by the influence of government funding, took the same data and, through careful analysis, reached a very different conclusion, providing what a Washington Post editorial lauded as a ‘useful stripping away of reputation in favor of fact.’