Looking at federal agencies through a political lens also offers numerous other insights into why programs and policies succeed or fail. A key determinant of a program’s success or failure is where it gets assigned. Programs and policies will be neglected if they are assigned to an agency that considers them peripheral to its primary mission (a phenomenon also observed by Wilson). The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), for example, considers science its primary mission. When resources become scarce, the nonscience programs the NOAA administers (nautical and aeronautical charting, for example) are the first to suffer (Seidman 1998, 16). Such assignment and organizational issues determine not only the success or failure of the program but also the balance of political power. A program assigned to an executive department will be subject to different lines of authority and accountability than a program assigned to an independent agency, a government corporation, or any one of the other bewildering variety of organizational arrangements in the federal bureaucracy. Institutional type thus helps determine how power and influence over a given program are distributed among the executive, the legislature, various organizational components within each branch, and organized interest groups.