Joe Adams’ career focuses on improving government.  His professional experience includes practice and consulting on budgeting and planning,  performance measures, program evaluation, and providing background research and recommendations to decision makes.  In addition to more than 50 studies and reports in the areas or finance, education, and performance management, he has published the most comprehensive study on the use of performance measures by Texas state agencies, covering a full decade of results (Managing for Results 2005 by Rowman & Littlefield). 

He is the Research Coordinator for the Public Affairs Research Council of Alabama, a good government think tank, located at Samford University.  He also teaches program evaluation for the doctoral program in Community College Leadership at Mississippi State University, where he taught courses in public administration and political science and served for four years as a Research Associate with the John C. Stennis Institute of Government, writing budgets for small towns in the Mississippi Delta and serving as an evaluator and grant reviewer for the U.S. Department of Education’s Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education. 

Joe has worked in a wide variety of public and private organizations, including eight years in state government, beginning with the Comptroller of the Treasury's Offices of Research and Educational Accountability in Tennessee, and in Texas with the Legislative Budget Board and the Texas Workforce Commission, where he served for four years as the agency's first director of planning. Previously, he was the research director for Political Research Inc., a publishing company in Dallas, Texas and a visiting assistant professor at Auburn University. His research interests focus on the relationships between ethics, leadership, and organizational performance in public institutions. He holds a B.A. from Texas A&M University (political science and history), and a Ph.D. (political science) from Vanderbilt University.

Joe and his wife Tyna are native Texans and met in high school in Brenham, Texas.