Plan Calls for Federal Agencies to Create Online Grant-Making Process by Next Year

Charities and other groups seeking federal money would be able to apply to federal agencies for grants online through a common Web site by the end of next year under a new plan proposed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

The plan, called E-Grants, is laid out in a draft report released last month to internal government working groups. The report says the new system — which, among other services, would electronically store grant seekers’ information so that it could be shared among grant-making agencies — would make it easier, faster, and cheaper for nonprofit groups to apply for federal support. The report calls for a government-wide grant application to be available online by October 2003.

“This is a unique, one-shot opportunity for nonprofits to eliminate a major, major headache in their lives,” said Kay Guinane, an official at OMB Watch, a Washington group that monitors government spending. “Common application, reporting, and auditing requirements would eliminate a lot of redundancy.”

Charity leaders who submitted comments to the government in response to the proposed plan say they support the project, but hope it will ultimately cover grant making by state and local governments and by foundations.

They also say that the project ought to do more to help standardize the grants process even after awards are made, such as by creating uniform reporting rules for grant recipients.

$350-Billion a Year

The Health and Human Services report comes less than a year after the agency released a report outlining the Bush administration’s plan to consolidate and overhaul federal rules on grants.

The current rules have been criticized as cumbersome and redundant. Congress ordered the overhaul in a 1999 law, the Federal Financial Assistance Management Improvement Act, which requires uniform application forms and reporting systems and calls for a streamlined federal grants process.

The federal government awards to charities, states, municipalities, and other entities more than $350-billion in grants annually through 600 programs at 26 agencies, such as the Department of Education and the National Endowment for the Arts. Many of the programs have separate procedures, involving their own software and requesting different kinds of information from grant applicants.

The E-Grants project represents a second effort to create a government-wide Web site for the administration of grants.

A project already under way, called Federal Commons, has a Web site, http://www.cfda.gov/federalcommons, with links to information about grant opportunities and a mock application process to demonstrate the kinds of services the site intends to offer. Federal Commons is part of the Bush administration’s efforts to comply with the 1999 grants-management law. E-Grants is part of a broader effort by the administration, called e-Government, to make it easier for people to interact with government via the Internet.

It is unclear how, or if, the government would coordinate the two online projects.

Ms. Guinane says it appears that the E-Grants project has the momentum. And, she says, nonprofit groups will need to get involved in its planning to make certain the project meets their needs.

OMB Watch has joined with the Urban Institute’s National Center for Charitable Statistics, a Washington group that collects charity data, and Philanthropic Research, a nonprofit group in Williamsburg, Va., that runs the charity database, Guidestar, to keep charities informed about the proposed changes, and to advocate for the kind of uniformity that they say would best serve charities.

The three groups want to ensure, for example, that any reporting standards developed by the government for a new grant-making system match the standards that already apply to the Form 990 informational tax returns that many charities must file.

Copies of the draft report can be downloaded from OMB Watch’s Web site at http://www.ombwatch.org/filemanager/fileview/10/.