There are a number of things there. One, they do not do it all from Washington. They have regional centres. Even though they're federally led, they're based on river basins: northeast U.S., north-central U.S., Alaska, northwest and so on. They also coordinate heavily with the states involved and with other communities. Finally, they have the central resources for the supercomputer systems and the army of scientists they have in different agencies, such as the U.S. Geological Survey, their weather service and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. They have to coordinate all of this as well.
They've done reasonably well over time, but they still feel they need to make further and much more rapid progress, so they set up this new co-operative institute to accelerate those improvements.