Cross-agency collaboration is widely viewed as a powerful means for government reform and performance improvement. Greater coordination across agencies offers the potential for the Federal government to address complex policy challenges that lie inherently across agency boundaries and jurisdictions. Further, cross-agency initiatives promise a means to increase efficiency, effectiveness and accountability by reducing overlap, redundancy and fragmentation. To further these ends, the Government Performance and Results Act Modernization Act of 2010 requires the Executive branch and federal agencies to develop cross-agency performance goals and specifies directives toward their advancement, use, review and measurement.

Several lines of research examine governance across boundaries from studies of federalism and intergovernmental relations to research on outsourcing and public-private partnerships to a rich vein of study related to interagency coordination within the federal government. This study focuses specifically on cross-agency collaboration in the federal government in the context of the GPRA Modernization Act and with attention to a series of institutional challenges to cross- agency coordination. It examines the use of tools by federal agency political appointees and career decision makers to overcome and work within these institutional challenges. The paper sketches recommendations to encourage wider use of such tools to advance cross-agency collaboration in federal agencies.