The Coordination Problem

What the geometry of a room taught me about the architecture of American science

Nearly two decades ago, from the mezzanine of the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study, I had an accidental view into the federal government’s central nervous system and its central pathology.

Below me, perhaps sixty deputy-level civil servants had gathered for a reception following a day of lightning talks. These are the people who run the federal science enterprise between administrations: the Senior Executive Service officials and GS-15s who preserve institutional memory, make quiet go/no-go decisions that shape enormous investments, and keep the machine running while political appointees cycle in and out every four years. I had helped organize the day. I should have been down there working the room. Instead, I found myself watching.

The geometry was diagnostic.

At opposite diagonals of the square great room, the military establishment and the health establishment had each formed their own gravitational field. Uniforms clustered near the windows on one side: NIH and FDA people near the bar on the other. In the center, NSF, the National Labs, and NASA circulated politely among themselves, moving between the two poles without quite bridging them. In an hour of watching, I did not see a single sustained conversation cross the diagonal. People talked past one another in the most literal sense — bodies angled slightly away, addressing their own.

We had brought them together to discuss the possibility of a very large, coordinated federal investment in neuroscience. What would eventually become the BRAIN Initiative had been conceived by a group of about eight academics, and we had started planning before the 2008 election: something worth pausing on. Designing a major scientific program before you know who the president will be requires a particular kind of institutional literacy. You’re not lobbying a specific administration. You’re trying to shape the landscape that any incoming administration will find. The goal was to socialize the concept across agencies before new leadership arrived: to get the deputies thinking in the same direction, because we understood something easy to forget: political will at the top is necessary but nowhere near sufficient. The deputies would have to cooperate. And cooperation, as the mezzanine made clear, was not their natural state.

What the room taught us was that the coordination problem was worse than we had imagined. These were talented, dedicated people who understood their own domains with real depth. They were not cynical or lazy. They were not obstructionist in any simple sense. But their domains didn’t speak to each other, and neither did they when placed in an unstructured social setting.

What we eventually learned and what the BRAIN Initiative’s structure was specifically designed to reflect is that interagency coordination on a scientific bet of this scale doesn’t emerge from shared interest, goodwill, or a well-intentioned convening. It requires a power center above the agencies, willing to spend real political capital making it happen. In our case, that meant the White House. Not a memo from the White House. Not a task force. Not a working group with a White House name attached. Active, sustained leadership from the Office of Science and Technology Policy, with the explicit backing of the President, is publicly committed.

That architecture is harder to build than it sounds, and easier to dismantle than anyone would like.

To understand why the view from the mezzanine looked the way it did, it helps to understand what happens inside federal agencies over decades and why the standard explanations for bureaucratic dysfunction miss the point.

The political science literature on interagency conflict tends to reach for two explanations: turf protection and bureaucratic inertia. Both are real. Neither is primary. The deeper explanation is cultural, and it runs much further down.

Large federal science agencies are not bureaucracies in the pejorative sense. They are genuine intellectual cultures, with their own histories, epistemologies, and ways of assigning value to scientific work. NIH thinks in terms of disease mechanisms, and the pathway to clinical translation — its entire grant review apparatus, its study section culture, and its publication norms are organized around proximity to the patient. NSF thinks in terms of fundamental discovery and the long-term health of scientific disciplines; it is institutionally suspicious of applied framing and has spent decades defending basic research against short-term thinking in Congress. The Department of Energy thinks in terms of national security infrastructure and large-scale systems; its scientific culture comes out of the weapons labs and reflects a tolerance for massive, centrally managed projects that neither NIH nor NSF can quite replicate. DARPA is a different animal still — structurally flat, program-manager-driven, deliberately averse to peer review — existing in permanent tension with the academic science norms that dominate NIH and NSF.

These are not trivial differences in vocabulary. They reflect decades of accumulated mission, shaped by the constituencies each agency serves, the appropriations subcommittees that fund them, and the scientific communities that define their identity and police their boundaries. A neuroscientist trained in the NIH system and one trained in the NSF system have, in many cases, genuinely different intuitions about what good science looks like. They aren’t wrong to have those intuitions. The problem is that cultures, once formed, defend themselves — not cynically, but almost automatically, the way an immune system responds to foreign tissue.

Consider a seemingly simple question that arose during the early planning for what would become the BRAIN Initiative: where should federally funded neuroscience publications and data live? What cyberinfrastructure would anchor a shared repository?

NIH’s answer was immediate: PubMed. They had built it, maintained it, and trusted it. It was already the de facto home for biomedical literature globally. That it was showing its age as a platform and that a genuinely new large-scale data infrastructure might warrant a genuinely new architecture were beside the point from NIH’s perspective — it worked, it was theirs, and extending it was the obvious path.

NSF’s answer came just as quickly, pointing in an entirely different direction: use the Department of Energy’s platform. Whether this reflected a genuine assessment of DOE’s technical capabilities in large-scale data infrastructure — and those capabilities were real — or a reflexive resistance to being absorbed into NIH’s scientific ecosystem was never entirely clear. Probably both. The two things are hard to disentangle from the inside.

What was clear was that no one in either room was discussing compromise, nor was anyone discussing what the scientific community needed from a shared repository. The conversation was about which agency’s infrastructure would anchor the enterprise, which meant which agency’s culture would shape it, which metadata standards would prevail, which access controls would govern it, and whose bureaucratic stamp would appear on a decade of scientific output. The White House, watching from above, grew visibly frustrated. Here were two agencies that shared a nominal commitment to advancing American science, deadlocked over a question any genuinely neutral party might have resolved in an afternoon. But there was no neutral party. There was only the accumulated weight of two institutional identities, each pulling toward its own gravity.

This is what silos look like from the inside. Not obstruction. Not incompetence. Just two organizations being, with perfect fidelity, exactly what they had each spent decades becoming. The tragedy of it is that the people involved often know it’s happening and can’t stop it anyway.

The PubMed standoff faded, as many such disputes do, into institutional stalemate — each agency continuing to do what it had always done, the shared infrastructure question deferred rather than resolved. No one had been explicitly asked to back down. No one had been forced to. The question simply became too costly to revisit.

The Biden Cancer Moonshot episode was different in kind, and I was there.

The scientific logic was almost painfully straightforward. The Department of Defense maintains medical records, including biological samples collected at peak physical condition, for millions of young, healthy service members, who are among the most comprehensively documented populations in the country. The Veterans Administration maintains longitudinal health records on many of those same people decades later, including those who developed cancer in the intervening years. Linking those two datasets would give cancer researchers something extraordinarily rare: a biological baseline matched to long-term health outcomes, at scale, across a population of millions. The potential to identify early biomarkers, track environmental and occupational exposures, and understand the gap between apparent health and latent disease was enormous. This was not a speculative idea. The scientific community had been pointing at this dataset for years.

Biden wanted it done. He had staked his political identity on the Cancer Moonshot. Senior officials from both DOD and the VA were in the room. Their answer, expressed through lawyers and deputy secretaries rather than principals, was no.

The refusal came wrapped in legal and technical language: privacy regulations, incompatible record architectures, classification concerns, HIPAA obligations applied in ways that seemed to expand whenever the conversation moved toward a specific plan. These were not entirely fabricated objections. The legal and technical barriers were real enough to be inconvenient. But they were not the real structure underneath. The real structure was territorial: two agencies, each with its own medical infrastructure, its own relationships with its patient population, its own institutional identity built around serving a defined constituency, being asked to subordinate that identity to a shared project they hadn’t designed, didn’t control, and couldn’t shape. The language of legal compliance had become the language of institutional resistance, dressed in a costume that made resistance look like responsibility.

Biden pushed back. With visible anger. This is worth pausing on: a Vice President of the United States, sitting in his own office, pressing senior officials with the kind of controlled fury that comes from watching something obviously right fail in real time, because two agencies couldn’t agree to share what they already had. The frustration wasn’t abstract. He understood exactly what was in those records and exactly why they weren’t being linked, and he was watching it happen in front of him anyway.

Eventually, under that sustained pressure, the agencies moved toward compliance. Plans were made. Commitments were extracted. Progress, of a kind, was achieved.

But note what it took. Not a policy directive. Not a new framework. Not a cross-agency working group. A Vice President of the United States, in a room, pressing senior officials personally and with considerable force. And note also what happened the moment that pressure lifted: the agencies returned to being exactly what they had always been, because the underlying structure had not changed at all. The legal and technical barriers had dissolved under sufficient political heat. Which meant they had never quite been the barriers they appeared to be, but the institutional logic that had generated them was entirely intact.

This is the second face of the coordination problem. The first is passive: agencies that simply don’t interact, like the clusters in the Krasnow great room, or NIH and NSF talking past each other about platforms, because talk’s their natural mode. The second is active: agencies that resist coordination when it threatens their domain and reach for procedural language to make that resistance look like something other than what it is.

The passive version is frustrating. The active version is dangerous because it is nearly invisible. It doesn’t look like resistance. It looks like due diligence.

What eventually worked was a structure we had begun designing before most of the relevant agencies knew the BRAIN Initiative existed as a concept. The eight or so of us who conceived it understood from the beginning that the science was the tractable part. Mapping the functional connectome of the human brain is hard. The coordination architecture was harder.

The core insight was simple, even if executing it was not: no agency would willingly subordinate itself to another. This is not a character flaw. It is a structural feature, almost a law of institutional physics. Any architecture that handed one agency primacy over the others, even for good programmatic reasons, would fail before it started, for exactly the reasons the PubMed dispute illustrated. The losing agency would not simply accept the outcome. It would use every procedural and legal tool available to relitigate, delay, and hollow out the shared project until it resembled the losing agency’s preferred alternative.

The Biden model, relying on a senior official’s personal fury, was not a system. It was a workaround that depended entirely on the political will, personal energy, and continued engagement of a single powerful individual who had approximately ten thousand other things demanding attention. That’s not architecture. That’s heroics, and heroics don’t scale and don’t persist.

The only authority above the agencies that was not one of them was the White House itself. So, we designed around that.

The BRAIN Initiative was structured from the outset with active OSTP leadership. Not OSTP as a convener or facilitator, roles that are easy to ignore, but OSTP as a genuine power center with the explicit backing of the President and a mandate that the agencies understood was real. Interagency working groups were stood up with White House participation, which changed the political valence of every meeting. When NIH, NSF, DARPA, the National Labs, and DOE sat down together, they were no longer negotiating as peers protecting their own turf in a vacuum. They were operating under a shared mandate from above: one that came with an audience, because the President had announced the initiative publicly and tied his name to it.

This last piece was not incidental. It was load-bearing. Obama’s public commitment changed the incentive structure in a specific way: failure to coordinate was no longer just an internal bureaucratic inconvenience, invisible to outsiders and costless to the agencies involved. It was a visible failure in a project the President had claimed ownership of, in a domain (neuroscience and brain disease) that commanded broad public sympathy. An agency that stonewalled the BRAIN Initiative was not just slowing down a program; it was undermining it. It was creating a political liability for the White House. That kind of exposure concentrates minds in ways that no amount of memo-writing or task-force-convening can replicate.

The territorial instincts didn’t disappear. They were overridden. There’s a crucial difference. An instinct that is merely overridden will reassert itself the moment the override lifts. But consistently overriding it across multiple decision points and over multiple years can create precedents, working relationships, and shared infrastructure that outlast any individual’s political engagement. The goal was never to eliminate the silos. It was to build enough scaffolding above them that the work could proceed despite them, and that, over time, the scaffold itself would become part of the institutional landscape.

None of this was accidental, and none of it was obvious at the time. It was designed by a small group of scientists who had spent enough time studying the geometry of these rooms to understand what it required.

I tell these stories now for reasons that go beyond neuroscience history.

The conditions that made the BRAIN Initiative’s coordination architecture work are precisely the ones most difficult to sustain and easiest to dismantle. They require a White House that understands interagency coordination as a design problem, not a personnel problem — not something you fix by installing the right people, but by building the right structure and maintaining it actively. They require OSTP to function as a genuine scientific leadership office rather than a ceremonial one. They require a President willing to publicly and visibly stake political capital on a specific scientific program, so that agencies feel the cost of non-compliance.

Large scientific bets, the kind that require a decade of sustained investment, genuine coordination across agencies with different cultures and different constituencies, and a tolerance for uncertainty that normal appropriations logic resists, are exactly the kind of programs most vulnerable to the coordination problem. Neuroscience was one. Pandemic preparedness is another. Climate modeling. Nuclear fusion. Quantum computing. The list is long, and what unites them is that no single agency can do them alone, and the gap between what a single agency can do alone and what a well-coordinated federal enterprise could do is, in many cases, the difference between success and failure.

The mezzanine view is still available to anyone who looks. The question is whether the people who need to understand what it shows are in any position to act on what they see.