Program evaluation (PE), although sometimes traced back to the 1930s, is a product of reform policies of the 1960s. PE can be regarded as an instrumental—as opposed to social, political, or juridical—feedback mechanism, by which politics and administration can judge program performance. In the first years of PE, the more the importance given to planned intervention, the more the quality of policy analysis changed as well. Planning staffs, social indicators and statistics in general, forecasting, cost-benefit analysis, electronic data processing, and evaluation were all gradually established in Bonn after the establishment of the reformist social-liberal coalition government in 1969. With externally ad hoc-initiated evaluations, the likelihood of negative results is relatively great, as there is always some truth in political feedback mechanisms. The more surprising it might be, then, that the Kohl government has not tried to tear down the existing evaluation arrangements which were too closely related to Social-Democrat reform policies.