Several mechanisms to facilitate coordination among FAA and partner agencies – including interagency committees, advisory boards, and working groups – are in place. First, the Senior Policy Committee, as the interagency governing body for NextGen, is meant to facilitate coordination and planning on NextGen across federal agencies. Chaired by the Secretary of Transportation, the Senior Policy Committee includes senior representatives from the NextGen partner agencies. Among its key activities, this committee works to provide policy guidance, resolve major policy issues, and identify and align resource needs. FAA and other partner agency officials indicated that the Senior Policy Committee has met infrequently. The Senior Policy Committee held their first full committee meeting under the new Administration in September 2009. According to the JPDO Director, JPDO is working closely with the Senior Policy Committee to establish a process for the committee to operate more effectively by providing it with the ability to review interagency dependencies such as FAA’s reliance on NASA research, develop a NextGen road map, and establish a set of high-level milestones—which it currently does not have—as well as conduct oversight of NextGen progress. In addition to the Senior Policy Committee, several other interagency coordination mechanisms are in place to facilitate coordination among FAA and partner agencies, many of which are within JPDO. These include the JPDO Board and the JPDO Division Directors Group, each of which is composed of representatives from other federal agencies and FAA. The JPDO Board functions as an adjunct to the Senior Policy Committee and includes representatives from each of the partner agencies. Representatives on the JPDO Board work on actionable outcomes related to NextGen. The Division Directors are responsible for the planning and managing of NextGen. JPDO also has organized nine working groups composed of representatives from federal agencies and industry stakeholders to specialize in developing NextGen’s key capabilities, along with recommendations and action plans to be integrated into NextGen planning. Continued industry participation in JPDO Working Groups – which is provided pro-bono – is a challenge given the current business climate and companies’ participation in numerous aviation forums. FAA and NASA also participate on four JPDO research transition teams that have been established to ensure that research and development needed for NextGen implementation is identified, conducted, and effectively transitioned to the implementing agency. In previous work, we discussed the formation of these teams, but as they had just been established, noted that their potential effectiveness was unclear. In that work we also identified key challenges in coordinating research, including gaps in funding for needed research and prioritization of research needs. According to the former Director of JPDO and NASA officials, the teams have been useful vehicles for identifying research needs and potential gaps; however, some teams are further along in terms of their involvement among the agencies and their deliverables than others. Although other agencies do not currently participate on these research transition teams, NASA agency officials reported that the structure could provide a model for future coordination across agencies. Other arenas where interagency coordination can take place also exist. For example, the NextGen Management Board, which will be chaired by FAA’s newly appointed Deputy Administrator and has representatives from all key FAA lines of business, addresses interagency collaboration on key issues such as maintaining the integrity of information shared through NextGen systems. A liaison from DOD sits on the NextGen Management Board. Our past work identified several leadership and organizational challenges in ensuring coordination across partner agencies. First, we have reported that while JPDO has been in place for several years, the office has experienced a high leadership turnover rate. In 2010, a new JPDO Director was appointed, the office’s fourth Director in its 7 years of existence. The lack of stable leadership has made it a challenge for JPDO to move forward on many goals and objectives. Second, in March of 2009, we reported that changes to JPDO’s organizational position placing it within ATO could be an impediment to partner agency coordination, as it created ambiguity about JPDO’s role and it lowered JPDO’s status in the eyes of stakeholders. Moreover, the creation of a staff to support the Senior Policy Committee resulting from a November 2008 Executive Order caused further confusion regarding roles and responsibilities relative to federal partner agencies. Third, with the ATO focused on implementing capabilities through the midterm, JPDO’s role was shifted to a focus on the long term beyond 2018. According to stakeholders and partner agency officials we interviewed for this work, given JPDO’s long-term focus, it has largely not been involved in ATO’s current near- and midterm activities, despite being placed organizationally within ATO. As a result, participation by the partner agencies in those activities is also limited. Agency officials stated that it is important for JPDO to be involved in near- and midterm activities as well as long-term planning to ensure that effective interagency coordination on NextGen is in place. Recent changes in the leadership and organizational position of JPDO are likely to change the nature of the relationship among JPDO, FAA, and its partner agencies and hold promise for increased coordination. JPDO has been elevated from its previous position within ATO and is now situated within FAA and outside of ATO, as illustrated in figure 1. The JPDO Director now reports directly to the Deputy FAA Administrator—who serves as the head of the NextGen Management Board—as well as serving as the Senior Advisor to the Secretary of Transportation. JPDO is also more closely aligned and is in a position to have a more active role with the Senior Policy Committee. This new structure removes the reporting relationship between JPDO and the Chief Operating Officer of ATO, and gives JPDO more visibility within the organization and with federal partners and other stakeholders. With these organizational moves, JPDO is expected to become a better conduit for monitoring cross-agency budgets and facilitating cross-agency collaborations and long-term research planning. Moreover, many of the key mechanisms for agency coordination, such as research transition teams, are within JPDO, and are likely to be affected by the move. According to the new Director of JPDO, a key step in improving the coordination with partner agencies will be to determine what value they see in the work produced by JPDO. As these changes have just recently occurred, it remains to be seen if the changes will result in better coordination across the partner agencies. In addition to these leadership and structural issues, stakeholders and representatives of the partner agencies identified other broad challenges that affect the extent to which some partner agencies have coordinated with others. These challenges include (1) limited funding and staffing to dedicate to NextGen activities, (2) competing mission priorities, and (3) undefined near-term roles and responsibilities of some partner agencies. Limited funding and staffing to dedicate to NextGen activities. Industry stakeholders and agency officials we spoke to stated that some partner agencies’ ability to coordinate with other agencies was affected by the levels of funding and staff that could be dedicated to NextGen activities. Officials at some partner agencies we spoke with stated that partner agencies allocated little or no budgetary funding specifically for NextGen activities and because of competing priorities for funds, they were limited in the resources they could dedicate to NextGen planning and coordination efforts. With respect to future investments, according to JPDO and DOT data, in fiscal year 2011, among NextGen partner agencies, three—FAA, NASA, and the Department of Commerce’s NOAA—requested some funding for NextGen activities. DOD and DHS did not request funding in their budgets specifically for NextGen activities. OSTP is working with the Office of Management and Budget to improve agency alignment and identification of NextGen-related budgets. Differences in agency mission. Differences among agencies’ mission priorities, particularly DHS’s and DOD’s, also pose a challenge to coordination efforts. DHS’s diverse set of mission priorities, ranging from aviation security to border protection, affects its level of involvement in NextGen activities. For example, events such as the 2009 Christmas Day terrorism attempt can shift DHS priorities quickly and move the agency away from focusing on issues such as NextGen, which are not as critical at that particular time. Agency officials also stated that although different departments within DHS are involved in related NextGen activities, such as security issues, the fact that NextGen implementation is not a formalized mission in DHS can affect DHS’s level of participation in NextGen activities. Industry stakeholders told us that there are potential consequences if DHS is not involved in long-term NextGen planning, including potentially marginalizing DHS’s NextGen areas, such as aviation security. Industry stakeholders reported that FAA could more effectively engage partner agencies in long-term planning by aligning implementation activities to agency mission priorities and by obtaining agency buy-in for actions required to transform the national airspace system. Undefined near-term roles and responsibilities of partner agencies. Some stakeholders and agency officials told us that FAA could do more to clearly define each partner agency’s role in key planning documents that guide NextGen implementation efforts, particularly in the near term. Our work has shown that coordinating agencies should work together to define and agree on their respective roles and responsibilities, including how the coordination effort will be led. We reported in 2008 that a key intended purpose of these planning documents, according to JPDO officials, is to provide the means for coordinating among the partner agencies and to identify each agency’s role in implementing NextGen capabilities, but that stakeholders said that the planning documents did not provide guidance for their organizational decision making. Some stakeholders and agency officials we spoke to more recently told us that the NextGen Implementation Plan, which identifies near- and midterm implementation efforts, still does not specify how partner agencies will be involved or what outcomes are required from them.