GAO released a new report yesterday -- Grants Management: Additional Actions Needed to Streamline and Simplify Processes [PDF] (highlights here [PDF]) -- which identifies progress towards fulfilling the objectives of PL106-107 [PDF], the Federal Financial Assistance Management Improvement Act of 1999. The report does a good job of summarizing the activities around grants streamlining, including the PL106-107 work groups, Grants.gov, and the Grants Executive Board. However, there are some significant omissions.
The GAO correctly recommends that OMB ensures that:
- Clear goals are articulated for PL106-107, Grants.gov, and the Grants Management Line of Business
- Agencies annually report on their progress in streamlining grants processes
- Efforts to implement common reporting continue
- PL106-107, Grants.gov, and the GM LoB are integrated into a single vision
- Grantee input is solicited and used regularly
The bottom line is that, consideringPL106-107 has been around for six years, and that it sunsets in a little over two years, not enough has been done to streamline grants processes. The report identifies three key causes:
- Different or conflicting business processes among agencies
- Structure of grants management functions, which is mainly a consequence of scale (e.g. HHS's $246 billion is managed in a decentralized whereas the NEH's $95 million is centralized)
- Existing grants streamlining activities and online grants management systems result in some agencies proceeding faster than others
All that said, the omissions are significant. First, there is no discussion of money. HHS is managing PL106-107 but the resources devoted to it are, to my knowledge, sourced from funds designated for other purposes. Even if HHS was given a pot of money to use for this purpose, as an agency it doesn't have the power to mandate change across the government. That must go through OMB, and OMB seems to have been reluctant to puts its money where the government's mouth is. Where money has been made available, such as Grants.gov, progress has been made relatively quickly. If the government wants to change, the government needs to give its people the resources to make that change.
Second, other than Grants.gov, the report omits examples of significant grants streamlining that has already been achieved. One of its primary complaints is that progress towards common reporting standards and mechanisms has been poor. I couldn't agree more. But they don't highlight successes such as Interagency Edison, which serves 23 agencies' inventions and patents reporting needs, and nor do they recognize efforts to consolidate systems at agencies such as USDA. [Disclaimer: My company created and developed iEdison, and we also created a Department-wide interface to Grants.gov for USDA.] In ignoring successes such as these, GAO dismisses the good work being done by many people around the government.
Third, the report ignores the efforts of the Interagency Electronic Grants Committee (IAEGC) in bringing together agencies to work on grants streamlining from a technology perspective. This in effect dismisses the input from vendors and grantees that the IAEGC helped inspire. Going forward, the National Grants Partnership and the Federal Demonstration Partnership are ready-made grantee groups that the government simply needs to engage more readily.
Fourth, GAO does not recognize the natural disinclination of agencies to share processes or systems to manage grants.
And, finally, the elephant in the room is ignored (as usual): the reason grant programs are duplicative and redundant is because Congress designs each program at its own whim. Until the programs and the requirements Congress makes of grantees are themselves rationalized, and until that rationalization becomes part of the financial assistance law-making process on an ongoing basis, the ability for agencies to make substantive progress towards streamlining will be shackled at the ankles.
On a more fundamental, agency program level, however, the GAO has one big issue absolutely correct:
The future relationship between the Grants Management Line of Business, P.L. 106-107 work groups, and the Grants.gov Program Management Officer is unclear. This management situation appears to have hampered progress.
Every agency we talk to has the same concern: what do we do right now, given the uncertainty around Federal grants management? To whom do we answer, and when? How can we make progress today when we don't know what's going to be demanded of us tomorrow?
Frankly, this is not difficult to solve. Truly. In fact, GAO identified several key practices for transformation in another report [PDF] not long ago. If these were applied to this problem, progress would be a great deal faster. Until there is a shared vision of the goal, and until efforts towards that goal are funded appropriately by OMB, progress towards grants streamlining will continue to be slow.
Government grants are known to benefit the business house to translate the start up into a high profit solvent business house. The publications are innumerable however procuring Government grants is primarily limited to not for profit organizations which are known to provide services and benefits for the community at large.
The provision of a Grant needs an enormous amount of research and assimilation of resources which could well be the modality of procuring of Government Grants.
The Government Grant provision federal agencies could well be applied to by using this electronically mediated agency. The different options available could well be identified and utilized. In contrast the Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance could well be accessed to identify and utilize the diverse grants and assistance available for Government Grants.
The concurrent option being to identify and access the topic areas site which would provide information on eligibility requirements and help evaluate as to whether the potential grant seeker meets the requisite qualifications for applying for the Government Grant.
Posted by: Grants | September 19, 2007 at 00:34
I'm not entirely sure that this comment can be parsed as English, but it resembles it enough for me not to delete it. Note, please, that this blog isn't a poster board for "We can help you win government grants!" type organizations. As it's possible that the site noted above may be helpful to others, however, I'll leave it up for now.
Posted by: Dave | September 19, 2007 at 09:23