This paper explores the advantages and disadvantages of different approaches to evaluating grant initiatives under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act Specifically, the report exploresfeatures of the grants that might influence the type of evaluation design that may be appropriate, possible objectives and types of research questions of interest to the Employment and Training Administration, different types of random assignment designs that could be used for the evaluation, and other types of methodologies that could be used should a random assignment approach be deemed either inappropriate or infeasible.