By Karen South Jones

The recent action by the president to “temporarily pause all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all Federal financial assistance . . . “ (OMB Memo 25-13) was ill-conceived and poorly executed. While the memorandum ordering the pause was rescinded within a day, the disbursement pause was not. 

Each president and his administration establishes their own funding priorities. Most federal funds are authorized by the Congress and it is the Congress — not the president — which has the authority to pause and or cease disbursement of those funds. It appears this president and his administration have little knowledge about how federal grants are awarded, seeming to believe that “we let bureaucrats autopilot federal spending” as Presidential Aide Stephen Miller said last week on CNN.

I have direct knowledge of how federal grants work. I wrote, and my agency received, a federal Drug-Free Communities Support Program grant from the White House Office of National Drug Control policy. We were initially awarded this five-year grant, which allows us to work at the community-level to prevent adolescent substance misuse, during the first Trump Administration. We were awarded another, final, five-year grant in President Biden’s term. I wrote the grant for our initial award and have written the continuation request every year since. These grant applications were incredibly detailed and often over 50 pages. While our grant awards are for five-year increments, our annual funding is not automatic. We are required to submit an annual continuation funding request and if we have not met the grant requirements, both programmatic and financial, our funding can be revoked. This allows appropriate government oversight for grant administration. Our grant also requires a local match which means for every dollar we receive from the federal government, we must match it with non-federal cash or in-kind contributions. 

In addition, I have served as an independent, non-government grant reviewer for the U.S. Departments of Labor and Justice for over 10 years. As a grant reviewer, I apply the criteria contained in federal funding opportunity announcements (FOAs) to assess grant applications. These FOAs often run to almost 100 pages and describe in painstaking detail the criteria which grant applicants must meet. After an initial assessment by the grantor agency to ensure applications meet qualifying criteria, they are assigned to reviewers like me. We typically have seven to 12 grants to review and to score. After all grants are scored, reviewers form a panel to compare those scores. This process ensures that applicants are screened fairly. For example, if I gave an applicant a low score on a particular criteria and another reviewer scored it higher, we would discuss where in the application we found — or did not find — the required information. I have adjusted my scores up and down based on these interactions. At the conclusion of panel reviews, the grantor agency ranks the grants based on our scores and makes the grant awards.

Most federal grants are highly competitive, with far more applicants than available funding would support. Every review panel on which I have served has taken seriously its responsibility to ensure that tax dollars are being awarded to entities with the administrative, fiscal, and programmatic capacity to achieve the results expected for the grant funding. Never has one of my panels “graded on a curve” or given an applicant points they did not deserve.

Following a federal funding award, recipient entities are required to keep extensive and detailed financial records and comply with rigorous reporting requirements. Many grants, including my agency’s, are on a reimbursement basis. Our grant award is $125,000 annually, but I do not receive that amount in a lump sum at the beginning of the fiscal year. I am required to submit a request for funds — which have already been expended — which are then reimbursed by the federal government. In addition, the terms of my grant preclude me from requesting or drawing down funds in excess of my actual reimbursement request. This is another layer of control and oversight which allows the awarding agency the ability to prevent the release of funds if issues are identified.

This is a great deal of information, but it is important. It’s important for people to know that the federal government is a detailed and rigorous taskmaster, holding grantees accountable for achieving results and doing so in a fiscally responsible manner. It is important because real people, both federal employees and just average Jane publics, like me, are involved in the grant award process. Is there waste? Maybe. We have all read about the “Bridge to Nowhere” and other pork belly federal spending. But those are frequently Congressional initiatives which were buried in or added to legislation and not part of the competitive federal grant process.

There has to be a better way to ensure fiscal accountability and adherence to an administration’s priorities than this blanket freeze on all federal grant disbursements. Congress and the president should figure out how to do it. 

Karen South Jones is the executive director of Rowan County Youth Services Bureau, Inc.