The Joint Engineering Team (JET) was created in 1997 to help coordinate large scale Federal networking activities to support research and engineering. Membership came from the Engineering and Operations Working Group (EOWG) of the Federal Networking Council (FNC), the Next Generation Internet Implementation Team (NGI IT), and representatives from Internet2 (I2). JET membership includes representation from Federal agencies, industry, academia, and other groups with an interest in high performance research networking.

The JET coordinates networking activities, operations, and plans,between multiple Federal agency networks (represented by DOD, DOE, NASA, and NSF), the NGI, and I2. Active projects are planning for network access points (NAPs, I2 gigaPoP's, STARLight, etc.), security, high performance research connectivity, international connections, traffic monitoring, performance measurement, new technology deployment (e.g. IPv6) and recommended best practices (e.g. 9000 Byte MTU )

The JET reports to the Large Scale Networking (LSN) Coordinating Group of the Interagency Working Group (IWG) on Information Technology Research and Development (IT R&D).