### LCA Applications and the US Federal Government  
LCA has developed across the federal government independently, with the greatest investments happening since the mid-1990s. The best-known examples of federal LCA work consist of modeling tools and datasets developed at the US Environmental ProtectionAgency (EPA), Department of Energy (DOE), and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). In the 1990s, the US EPA developed TRACI, a standardized set of impact characterization factors for the United States [3]. The EPA continues to maintain and update TRACI, providing one of the necessary pieces of the puzzle to consistently use LCA in policy and regulatory contexts. The DOE Argonne National Laboratory has been developing the Greenhouse Gases, Regulated Emissions, and Energy Use in Transportation (GREET) tool since 1996. GREET provides an integrated model of on-road transportation, including conventional and advanced technologies. A range of applications use this model--for example the California Air Resources Board uses GREET as a calculator for managing the California Low Carbon Fuels Standard regulation [4]. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory has maintained the US LCI since 2001. The US LCI makes industry specific and general US background data available through an open repository [5]. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has been developing the Building for Environmental and Economic Sustainability (BEES) tool, an LCA tool for building materials used by the Green Building Council for LEED certification. The National Energy Technology Laboratory produces LCA work that serves as the foundation for government programs such as the federal Renewable Fuels Standard (RFS2) and the Carbon Dioxide Utilization Program (CO2U). The GREET tool from Argonne National Laboratory clearly illustrates the many sectors of industry and government that can touch a single LCA application. On-road transportation is the primary scope of GREET, which has two main components: vehicle manufacture and fuel pathways. The construction of vehicles requires metals and other critical minerals, rubber and plastics, glass, and fabrics, as well as transportation, manufacturing, infrastructure, and energy. The development of conventional fuel pathways covers the life cycle of fossil fuel extraction, transport, refining, and combustion. Alternative fuels require data representing new feedstocks--such as corn, soybeans, or miscanthus--and energy carriers such as lithium-ion batteries and hydrogen fuel cells cover a range of specialized materials. Finally, the characterization of emissions into impacts of interest require knowledge in risk assessment and toxicology. As such, no one person or organization has all the knowledge necessary to produce LCA results. Instead, LCA relies on expertise drawn from a range of sources, literature, databases, and tools (both public and proprietary), and a professional network of experts. The federal government has much of the expertise necessary for a tool like LCA residing in different agencies and serving the missions of their respective departments. Sharing the expertise across agencies improves the quality of the LCA products the government produces and makes more efficient use of taxpayer funds. The LCA Commons effort to coordinate the federal capacity has been underway in earnest since 2014. In 2012, the USDA National Agricultural Library (NAL) began the LCA Commons activity with the intention of making agricultural data and LCA related information easily available to the public. NAL set up a repository using openLCA software [6] and uploaded LCA models of commodity crop production. NAL also began hosting the USLCI for NREL using the same openLCA application on the NAL servers. This initial coordination between DOE and NAL led to a meeting hosted at the USDA headquarters in Washington DC in 2014 to explore an idea long championed by the EPA--a coordinated interagency LCA initiative. Engineers and program managers from DOE National Labs, USDA, EPA, and GSA attended this meeting.