With the cost of college soaring and the national six-year completion rate below 60 percent, the federal government's support for higher education faces heightened scrutiny. What kind of regulation and accountability should Congress impose on Washington's hefty funding of Pell grants and subsidized loans? As legislators turn their attention to revising the Higher Education Act (HEA), are current levels of regulation sufficient and appropriate, or is there perhaps too much paperwork, bureaucracy, and compliance? What can be learned from the Obama administration's efforts to hold underperforming programs to account? This article by Michael B. Horn, co-founder of the Clayton Christensen Institute and an executive editor of "Education Next," with Alana Dunagan, a research fellow at the Christensen Institute, explains that every year the federal government spends more than $100 billion on higher education, mainly in the form of grants and subsidized loans to students, and the government ends up investing taxpayer dollars in programs with low returns. Federal spending has partially fueled the annual tuition increases that in recent decades have become endemic in higher education. The House of Representatives has produced a draft reauthorization of the HEA called the Promoting Real Opportunity, Success, and Prosperity through Education Reform (PROSPER) Act. PROSPER's authors tout it as promoting innovation because it eliminates some of HEA's regulations intended as consumer protections, including the gainful-employment provision that the Obama administration used to hold career training programs accountable if their students graduated with debt they couldn't afford, and the 90/10 rule, requiring for-profit schools to raise at least 10 percent of their revenue from non-federal sources. The PROSPER Act strips away many of the rules and definitions that constrain competency based education programs. With the pending reauthorization of HEA, policymakers have an opportunity to craft a framework that unleashes innovators and stimulates them to focus on creating value for students and society. The key, though, isn't to debate whether there is too little or too much regulation but to concentrate on paying innovators for outcomes instead of constraining them by regulating inputs. [For "How Can Congress Spur Innovation While Clamping down on Fraud? Forum: Rethinking the Rules on Federal Higher-Ed Spending," see EJ1191013.]