Technical Abstract: The invasion and rapid spread of West Nile virus (WNV) across the U.S. demonstrated our vulnerability to emerging mosquito-borne viruses, but also showed our ability to identify weaknesses and develop strategies to reduce them. For example, although many counties already had vector and disease surveillance programs the arrival of WNV compelled many more communities to initiate them. Unfortunately, the protective infrastructure that grew during our reaction to WNV dissolves as funding is repositioned to new threats. With each new threat public health agencies are charged with response plans and disbursement of funds into a tangled web of bench scientists and boots on the ground. Two key shortfalls in our approach to emerging disease threats come out of this. New committees and infrastructure are formed to deal with new threats reactively and wheels are reinvented, and agencies tend to work independently, so wheels are reinvented in parallel. On December 5, 2006, the APHIS Centers for Epidemiology and Animal Health in Fort Collins, Colorado, hosted a multi-agency working group formed to confront the issue of Rift Valley fever (RVF) with an awareness of these shortfalls.