This article presents a plenary address wherein the author talks about cultural clashes, about what happens when evaluation meets politics. In her address, the author talks about the kinds of clashes that occur on a regular basis between evaluative independence and the political culture it challenges, along with possible ways to predict, parry, or even avoid some of these clashes. She draws on her own experience in conducting both executive branch and legislative branch evaluations, part of which comes to her from running the Program Evaluation and Methodology Division (PEMD) within the Government Accountability Office (GAO) over 14 years. She examines how the problems have arisen and evolved and describes how they tried to resolve some of these problems. She tries to pinpoint where the major clashes of culture have tended to occur and looks a little more closely at how governmental structure affects evaluation.