When enacting major new legislation like the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Biden administration pledged that small, underserved communities would win a fair share of the hundreds of billions of new grant money coming down the pike. But so far, the effort seems to be falling short, according to testimony at a Senate panel hearing Tuesday.
Even major cities like Detroit, which bulked up its grants team in 2017, can have a tough time hacking through the red tape to access grant money.
"If it's difficult for professional grants management organization in a major American city, I can only imagine how challenging that would be to smaller cities," Detroit's deputy CFO Meagan Elliott told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Tuesday during the hearing titled "Improving Access to Federal Grants for Underserved Communities."
More than 50 federal agencies distribute grants to 131,000 recipient organizations from 1,900 different grant programs, said committee chair Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich.
"Each one has its own application and award process that can be difficult to navigate," Peters said. "The federal government can do more to help all of our communities."
In fiscal 2022, federal aid to tribal, state, local, and territorial governments—primarily through grants—totaled $1.2 trillion, according to Government Accountability Office's director of strategic issues Jeff Arkin, who testified at the hearing.
The GAO has identified several challenges – many of which have persisted for years – that block access for under-resourced communities, including lack of capacity, duplicative or overly burdensome grants management requirements, and lack of timely, complete or accurate grant data, Arkin said.
The GAO has previously found that municipalities in fiscal crisis, like the city of Flint, Michigan, which would benefit from federal money, struggled to find the staff needed to compete for grants, Arkin said.
A good start would be ditching the "government legalese" that grant Notice of Funding Opportunities, or NOFOs, are written in, said Matthew Hanson, associate managing director at consulting firm Witt O'Brien's LLC.
"The problem is when you pull up a NOFO and you're faced with 70 pages and it takes you three and a half hours to find out if you're even eligible for the program or not," Hanson said. "It really starts with the first step, which is figuring out if you can even apply for a grant or not."
Peters said he's introducing legislation to increase accessibility by "simplifying grant announcements and requiring announcements to use plain, easy-to-understand language."
"Too often the feds' lack of coordination falls on under-resourced communities," Peters said. "Reducing the complexity of the federal grant process can improve access and promote the responsible use of taxpayer money."
"This is an incredibly large, incredibly complicated issue," said Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla. Part of the problem is where some of the money goes, Lankford said, citing grants that fund esoteric topics like creating a virtual reality Shakespearean theater.
"We have a larger issue on grants and with $1 trillion of grant spending, we have to determine whether [it goes to] a water system that desperately needs help and or a study on the meaning of sound in colonial Mexico."
