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ACUS committee debates draft recommendations to strengthen federal collaboration with state, local, tribal and territorial governments
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Summary
The Administrative Conference of the United States’ Committee on Regulation reviewed a draft package of recommendations urging federal agencies to institutionalize collaboration with state, local, tribal and territorial governments, sparking debate over definitions, scope and implementation details; the committee referred editorial changes to style and set a follow-up meeting.
The Administrative Conference of the United States’ Committee on Regulation on Thursday reviewed a draft set of recommendations aimed at strengthening federal agencies’ collaboration with state, local, tribal and territorial governments.
Staff counsel Caja Caldwell opened the meeting, saying the committee would consider recommendations on “federal agency collaboration with state, local, tribal, and territorial governments.” ACUS Research Director Jeremy Craboitz thanked the authors and turned the floor to consultants Professors Jennifer Saline and Pamela Kauser McCann, who summarized the report’s methods and findings. “We talked to over 60 persons from federal agencies, GAO, state, local, tribal and territorial governments, associations … and representatives who advocate for state, local, tribal and territorial interests,” Saline said. She told members that interviews and statutory text analysis showed recurring themes—people, face-to-face interactions, financial assistance, regional offices and information sharing.
The draft recommendations range from directing agencies to “establish or reinforce” organizational units and supervisory structures for intergovernmental collaboration, to urging agencies to reduce administrative burdens on subnational partners, formalize agreements when appropriate, collect information about collaborations, and publish up‑to‑date contact points and summaries of collaborative arrangements on agency websites.
Debate centered on three recurring questions: how to define “collaboration,” how broadly to apply recommendations to statutory functions where agencies have formal delegations (such as licensing or State Implementation Plan oversight), and how prescriptive the recommendations should be about internal agency structures.
Peter Strauss, a committee member, said he was “kind of missing a definition of collaboration” and worried the recommendations could be ill‑fitting where agencies have formal statutory responsibilities. “This really goes to what I had said earlier: I like this part of it a lot, but the recommendation ought to open with the definition of what is meant by collaboration,” Strauss said, adding that oversight tasks such as nuclear medicine licensing or EPA State Implementation Plan approvals raise distinct issues.
The consultants said the report deliberately adopted a broad definition to capture both formal and informal joint activities. “We do define collaboration … as any formal or informal joint activity by federal agencies and state, local, tribal and territorial governments that are intended to provide more public value than could be produced when the partners act alone,” Saline said. She and McCann acknowledged the need to identify places where narrower language may be appropriate and suggested addressing those limits in the preamble.
Members pushed for practical clarifications. Several asked for language that would allow agencies to “establish or reinforce” structures rather than mandate new offices in every case; others recommended that a single agency‑wide official could be inappropriate for agencies that already have multiple program offices coordinating with different state or tribal counterparts. The committee discussed alternatives—designating officials by program or office or allowing teams and stable inboxes that survive staff turnover.
On implementation, members urged the committee to include guidance and models for agencies that lack resources or capacity. One member noted the draft’s recommendations were “20 points and extremely directive” and recommended development of supporting implementation tools—model plans, training materials and exemplars—to accompany the final text.
The committee also debated recordkeeping and evaluation. Drafters proposed that agencies “collect information about collaborations” (agreements, who communicates with whom, how collaborations develop, and performance relative to stated objectives) so agencies can evaluate and plan across many partnerships. Members flagged the burden of memorializing every interaction and suggested collecting summaries of substantive communications and keeping agreements and key documents in a central, accessible repository.
On interagency sharing, participants recommended building a community of practice to exchange lessons rather than assigning coordination responsibilities to the Executive Office of the President. One member proposed that ACUS itself could host such a forum or compile examples and models for agencies.
The committee agreed to send textual fixes and cross‑references to the Committee on Style, to add preamble language clarifying scope and triggers (for example, when a program is new or undergoing major change), and to reconvene to review the preamble after edits. The committee scheduled a follow‑up meeting for Thursday, October 2 at 9:30 a.m.
The meeting produced no formal motions or votes; members instead focused on refining language and identifying places where implementation guidance or preamble caveats would be helpful. The consultants said the draft will continue to be revised through November in light of the committee’s feedback.
