Pursuit's Take
The USDA’s principal research agencies, Agricultural Research Service (ARS) and National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), play a key role in supporting agricultural science, and questions have been raised about the extent to which the two agencies may be performing duplicative research and whether the agencies collaborate in planning research.
The Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Agricultural Research Service and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture generally focus on many of the same broad topics and rely on agency safeguards, as well as on the scientific community’s professional norms, to prevent inadvertent duplication of research projects within and between the agencies. Shortcomings with certain agency safeguards, however, may increase the potential risk of project duplication within or between the two agencies.