Report describes roadblocks to intergovernmental cooperation

If your boss is prone to turf building and provincialism, you may want to surreptitiously slide a copy of the General Services Administration's new study on interagency and intergovernmental cooperation into his or her in-box.

The study, The Challenging Road to the Government of the Future: Intergovernmental Management Issues and Directions, suggests that public demand for better service from government agencies will force feds to cooperate more with each other and with state and local governments.

"There is a need to focus on the work that government does as a set of functions and move away from an orientation toward organizations, processes and stovepiped functions," the report said. "Our customers, the public, care about how government functions. They care very little about how the government is organized. With this revised focus, the government is better able to be a responsive body ensuring the satisfaction of its customers."

GSA's office of intergovernmental solutions issued the report, which looks at examples of cooperation between government units at different levels.

For example, the report examines the federal-state drive to use electronic benefits transfers for food stamps and other government benefits programs. The Office of Management and Budget, the Departments of Health and Human Services, Agriculture, and Treasury and other federal agencies have worked with state governors on the initiative.

"States were encouraged to work with the federal government and other states to form coalitions whereby single development efforts, coupled with higher volumes of cases and transactions, would lead to economies of scale in system development and operations," the report said.

The report also points out pitfalls in intergovernmental relationships. Because federal-state-local initiatives typically involve many different organizations, making decisions and reaching agreement on plans takes longer than when an agency works alone on a project. In information technology projects, agencies and states often have different systems standards, making it harder to share data. In addition, personal data on citizens is often protected by law.

"There are some legislative constraints to data sharing," the report says. "However, additional restrictions are often claimed due to an organization or individual being overly protective. So, sometimes it is not clear which constraints are real. What is known is that every time data sharing among agencies is proposed, there is often an immediate reaction of, 'We can't do that.'"

Managers, the report says, must keep in mind several factors that make intergovernmental relations difficult:

• Program managers are not responsible to a single individual, but to many key players. Managers must keep all partners informed in the decisionmaking process.
• There are few mechanisms that provide funding for cross-agency or cross-government initiatives.
• Managers need to identify the key decisionmakers. For electronic benefits transfers, for example, it was important to get buy-in from state governors.
• It is unclear who is supposed to finance, deliver, and administer many programs.
• Conflicting federal and state priorities get in the way of efficient project management.