Flavors of Interagency Collaboration

For many reasons, such as avoidance of duplication, leveraging of other agency investments, or discovery of advances already underway, agencies of the Federal Government engage in various forms of collaboration. There is a wide range of "flavors" of such collaboration: Executive Office National Science and Technology Council committees, Office of Science and Technology Policy working groups, national initiatives such as the High Performance Computing Initiative, special calls for science funding data from the Office of Budget Management, or special efforts started by one agency head trying to engage others in a focused area.

None of these "top-down" efforts are as effective as direct program manager to program manager interaction. Top down initiatives usually devolve into high-level posturing in order to win a larger portion of the budget pie in a particular funding area. For this reason, most agencies are unwilling to reveal details of efforts nor invite hands-on collaboration in funding. The significant results from such interactions are usually seen in rearrangements of the President's budget request.

Most significant interagency collaboration results from the direct interaction and hands-on teamwork of program managers from different agencies. Even this type of interaction has many "flavors". Program managers can agree in a formal way to joint calls for proposals with agreed-to procedures on how to handle review and funding of proposals received. They can also attend each other's PI meetings to learn of funded efforts, track results, and agree on how to handle efforts of joint interest.

One of the least utilized, but probably most useful forms of interaction among agencies is detailing of program managers from one agency to another for two to three years. Interagency details usually involve the host agency transferring to the home agency the loaded salary of the manager during the period of the detail. Only when a program manager actually sits and functions in an agency for an extended period of time can they appreciate the dynamics, and especially the politics, of the processes in that agency. Each agency is like a separate culture with little overlap in processes and procedures. My own direct experience as a program manager was in NSF, DARPA, and DHS, but I have had extended exposure to NIH, NSA, NASA, NGA, and several others. In addition, I have observed all science-funding agencies from the position of several different Executive Office committees. Yet I have never observed any two agencies' science funding processes being essentially the same. Each one practices the funding of science in a very different way.

Perhaps this diversity of approaches is appropriate for the health of US science, and perhaps the differing missions of the agencies are the principal reason for this diversity, but this diversity calls for even greater attention to interagency collaboration. Since the way in which agencies "cover" science differ so much, they are not likely to have the same understandings and are therefore likely to benefit from collaboration with other agencies.