On January 18, 2011, President Obama issued Executive Order 13563 in an effort to improve and streamline the federal agencies' procedures. Section 6 instructs each agency to perform an internal retrospective analysis of its regulations to determine what, if any, rules are outdated, ineffective or complicated. By reviewing the effect of each rule, an agency can determine what works, what does not work and what policies to simplify.
NASA performed a study on the Apollo Project, determining the driving forces behind, and the results of, the space project and putting a man on the moon. Political pressure, namely how the United States felt about communism, resulted in President Kennedy's decision to produce results before the Soviet Union without regard to expense. It becomes apparent that without the imperative of beating Russia to space and proving America's superiority over communism, the United States would not have allotted the massive funding and resources necessary to put a man on the moon.
Fisheries and farmers improve potential yields through studies of past harvests, including managerial decisions and unforeseen anomalies. Steven J. D. Martell, Carl J. Walters and Ray Hilborn saw that schools of sockeye salmon in the Bristol Bay and Fraser River area did not reach the school volume possible and, consequently, produced smaller harvests. The team studied previous yield, stock, weather, anomaly and harvesting information and discovered that if managers estimated the ideal spawning stock size and left a specific portion of it unharvested, they would improve their overall yield by almost 40 percent.
Medical experts use retrospective analyses to determine what advice to give patients on living a healthy life, what drugs to prescribe and what tests to order. Mattias Öberg and his colleagues collected the most recent, thorough data concerning people affected by disease from 192 countries and used it to estimate how secondhand smoke harms people. Using the records of men, women and children in different countries, these doctors found the average number of people exposed to secondhand smoke and what, if any, diseases affected them. Applying the comparative risk assessment method showed people's health would benefit from the continued use and expansions on current "public health and clinical interventions to reduce passive smoking worldwide."