Interagency Collaboration

In Process

Global geographic alignments differ among agencies, which have a variety of rationales for how they are organized and aligned in different regions of the world. To address their international responsibilities, DOD, State, USAID, and certain intelligence agencies are organized by geographic region. These agencies also have functional components or issue-based offices that serve across all geographic regions. The other four agencies we reviewed--Commerce, DHS, Justice, and Treasury--have missions that are predominantly domestic in nature, and are organized primarily by functions or issues; however, these agencies also have some offices and components that are organized geographically. Moreover, we determined that, in northern Africa and southwest Asia, DOD, State, and USAID have alignments that are notably different from one another. Officials we interviewed from all of the agencies stated that the rationale behind their current alignment is related to achieving agency-specific mission objectives. Several agencies also cited other rationales, such as cultural, historical, or economic connections among countries, or the need to balance workloads within the agencies. All of the agencies indicated that they need the flexibility to reorganize their geographic alignments to better meet mission requirements. Four agencies identified advantages to a common geographic alignment. Three of these agencies pointed to DOD's creation of U.S. Africa Command as an advantage of a common alignment because it improved the coordination among a DOD combatant command, State, and USAID. However, these three agencies--in addition to Commerce, DHS, and Treasury--also identified disadvantages to having a common geographic alignment. For example, State officials indicated that realigning State's regional bureaus to look like DOD's combatant commands could lead international partners to view this step as emphasizing a military approach towards U.S. diplomacy. Commerce, DHS, and Justice identified specific obstacles to changing their alignments, such as the potential need to increase personnel or retrain staff, because the agencies are tailored in size and expertise to their current regional responsibilities. In examining interagency collaboration challenges in northern Africa and southwest Asia, we found that the different geographic alignment among DOD, State, and USAID does not appear to be a significant factor. However, we also found that agencies continue to face collaboration challenges, consistent with those that we have identified in our prior work, and that agencies are taking some steps to address such challenges. Our prior work identified challenges to interagency collaboration, such as the lack of a comprehensive strategy and milestones for counterterrorism activities in northern Africa, the lack of clear agency roles and responsibilities for undertaking counterpiracy operations, and problems in creating a database of development projects in Afghanistan that is accessible to all relevant agencies. During this review, agencies identified similar challenges, including differences among agency cultures and planning processes, and difficulties in developing consensus around competing priorities. We also found that State, DOD, USAID, and others are taking some steps to address interagency collaboration challenges by elevating the importance of interagency collaboration in their strategic plans and through other measures. For example, U.S. Central Command embeds civilian personnel into its command structure and stated that a "whole of government" approach is integral to the command's operational design. We are not making new recommendations based on this review, because many of the examples of interagency collaboration challenges that we identified are similar to those that we have identified in prior work. Agencies generally agreed with the recommendations from our prior work, and have taken steps to implement some of them.