The policy problems that matter most — the complex, multi-dimensional challenges that define the current governance agenda — all require coordination across agencies that are structurally designed to work independently.
The Coordination Architecture's Limits
The federal government's cross-agency coordination architecture — the National Security Council, the domestic policy councils, the interagency working groups, and the various formal and informal coordination mechanisms through which the fragmented executive branch is supposed to pursue coherent policy — is systematically inadequate for the complexity of the coordination challenges that the current governance agenda presents. Climate change requires coordination across the EPA, the Department of Energy, the Department of Transportation, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of the Interior, and the international policy apparatus. Pandemic response requires coordination across HHS, CDC, FEMA, the Department of Defence, the State Department, and the economic policy apparatus. Immigration requires coordination across DHS, the State Department, the Department of Justice, and the domestic policy apparatus. Each of these policy domains requires exactly the kind of sustained, technically sophisticated interagency coordination that the executive branch's fragmented design makes structurally difficult.
Why Coordination Fails
Cross-agency coordination fails for structural reasons that are not resolved by the formal coordination mechanisms the executive branch has developed. Each agency has its own statutory mission, its own congressional committee relationships, its own constituency, and its own institutional interest in maintaining its authority and budget. Coordination that requires an agency to subordinate its institutional interest to the collective interest of the interagency process faces the same collective action problem that makes coordination difficult in any context where the individual actor has more to gain from preserving its autonomy than from accepting the coordination that the collective problem requires.
Cross-agency coordination failure is the executive branch's most consequential structural problem for the governance of complex modern challenges. The problems that matter most do not respect agency boundaries. The governance architecture that addresses them as if they do will continue to produce the coordination failures that leave those problems poorly managed despite the resources that individual agencies bring to them independently.
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