Regional Development: Additional Collaboration Could Reduce Overlap Risks
Fast Facts
Regional and local communities use federal economic development programs to create job opportunities and promote growth across the country. Multiple federal agencies run one hundred and forty such programs between them.
Agency collaboration efforts, however, have stalled in recent years, even though sustained collaboration could help each agency manage its resources better and avoid duplicating work that another agency has already funded.
Highlights
The Development Administration is the only agency that focuses solely on economic development, which makes its coordinating role unusually important to the efficiency of the whole portfolio of federal spending in this area.
We examined interagency agreements signed over the last decade and found that most had lapsed without renewal, and that no agency had assumed responsibility for tracking which programs served overlapping populations.
Communities that depend on more than one program reported that they could not determine which agency to approach first, and that each application asked for substantially the same supporting documentation as the others.
Officials at three of the four agencies we spoke to said that they had no mechanism for learning what the other agencies had already funded within a given region, and no obligation under current policy to go looking for it.
Recommendations for Executive Action
We recommend that the Development Administration resume and improve its interagency collaboration efforts in order to manage the risks of overlap and to capture the benefits that coordinated programs offer communities.
The Secretary should ensure that the agency reports annually on the status of each interagency agreement and on the populations that overlap between programs, so the Congress can see where duplicated spending is.