Professor Jane Fountain (political science and public policy) has released a report through the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS), a public-private partnership whose goal is to make government work more efficiently.
The report, titled “Examining Constraints To, and Providing Tools For, Cross-Agency Collaboration,” is publicly available on the ACUS website for public comment, and, in December, ACUS members will vote on a set of recommendations to federal government entities based on Fountain’s study.
“Cross-agency collaboration is widely viewed as a powerful means for government reform and performance improvement,” said Fountain. “Greater coordination across agencies offers the potential for the federal government to address complex policy challenges that lie inherently across agency boundaries and jurisdictions. …[Such collaboration promises] a means to increase efficiency, effectiveness and accountability by reducing overlap, redundancy and fragmentation.”
The Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) Modernization Act of 2010 seeks to expand the federal government’s use of cross-agency collaboration to solve complex policy problems such as food safety, sustainable communities, veteran homelessness and energy efficiency and to make government more efficient and effective.
GPRA Modernization introduces new tools to foster collaboration, according to Fountain, but little attention has been given to a series of institutional challenges to cross-agency coordination. Fountain’s report “examines the use of tools by federal agency political appointees and career decision makers to overcome and work within these institutional challenges,” she said. “The recommendations encourage wider use of such tools to advance cross-agency collaboration in federal agencies.”
Fountain, who also directs the National Center for Digital Government, is currently working with graduate and undergraduate research assistants at the University of Massachusetts Amherst to develop the report into a book.