As Yogi Berra once said, this is déjà vu all over again. The United States Government has many talented employees with critical skills and expertise, but its departments and agencies don’t always play well together. Even when they share common interests and common goals, they often fail to coordinate effectively, if at all. This can cause agencies to duplicate efforts, or worse, to work at cross purposes, which hardly makes the most of our resources to achieve our strategic objectives.
While not a new problem, the issue has lately taken on new urgency, particularly in the area of national security. The post-9/11 challenges that confront our nation – such as fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, combating terrorism, and preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction – require strategies that embrace the capabilities of all government agencies. Unfortunately, eight years into the twenty-first century, our institutions and policies maintain a lot of Cold War organization and thinking, but lack the common focus of the Soviet threat.
The few existing mechanisms to bring together the departments that should play a role in developing national security policy and translating that policy into action are weak. These mechanisms are usually the ad hoc efforts of those directly engaged in the challenge of the moment, and not the result of a broader deliberative process. The experiences of U.S. service members and civilians working with Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Iraq and Afghanistan are prime examples that show how interagency solutions can be forged by necessity in the field. But there must be a better way – we shouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel each time agencies need to join forces.
In historic testimony before the House Armed Services Committee last April, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice agreed that interagency cooperation is absolutely essential to our national security. And they both made the point that many issues between their respective departments are resolved because these two secretaries work well together – a fact that is understood by their staffs. Although that reflects well on these public servants, experience in our not-too-distant past tells us that it is unrealistic to expect that our nation will always have cabinet officers in place who make it a priority to work well with each other. Until our government reforms the interagency process, we will continue to have problems.
In years past, Congress has led the way on similar monumental reform efforts. During the early 1980s, the House Armed Services Committee learned through testimony that our military services were dysfunctional when called upon to work together. It took four years of hearings and debate, but legislation to bring jointness to the operations of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps became law with the Goldwater Nichols Act of 1986. Goldwater Nichols made fundamental changes to the culture of the military services, and the legislation faced strong institutional opposition, but today there is broad consensus that these reforms changed the Pentagon for the better.
Keeping in mind the lessons learned from these earlier efforts to promote military jointness, I believe we can make a success of interagency reform, but I am under no illusion that this will be easy. As with Goldwater Nichols, interagency reform will require significant cultural changes within federal departments. It will require budget coordination across agencies as well as the development of strategies that can be executed comprehensively. There must also be incentives to reward personnel who embrace opportunities to work in an interagency manner. An additional challenge is the need for significant cooperation between numerous committees of Congress.
As interagency reforms are introduced, some people will resist new ways of doing business. And yes, a few choice words may even be exchanged. But interagency reform is a serious task that will improve the way federal departments and agencies work together in the long run. Although this is unlikely to be the kind of effort that generates exciting headlines, done right we may avoid the kinds of headlines we don’t want to see. As my friend the late Sheriff Gene Darnell always told me, the best politics is doing a good job. A strong commitment to interagency reform definitely falls into this category.
U.S. Representative Ike Skelton, D-4th Dist., MO., Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee