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New $1.9T COVID bill, American Rescue Plan Act, signed: grant seekers and grant writers pay heed!

In January, I wrote “New Combo COVID-19 stimulus bill and budget bill will have tons of grant ‘ornaments’.” Two months later, and Congress passed and President Biden signed the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA).* You know you have a significant spending bill when NPR calls the bill “colossal.” I’ve been writing grant proposals since dinosaurs walked the earth (in fact, about the same year Biden entered the Senate!) and to paraphrase Jeff Lynnes ELO masterpiece Do Ya, “I never seen nothing like this”.

Despite the bill’s name, much of the spending dumps huge amounts of money into existing and new programs, rather than direct COVID relief. As grant writers, we’re not professionally interested in odd items like direct subsidies to farmers of color or the potential upending of Clintons’ 1996 welfare reform by providing “child tax credits” that are actually in effect direct welfare payments. We’re professionally interested in funding for dozens, maybe hundreds, of discretionary/competitive grant programs authorized by ARPA.

ARPA is something like 5,000 pages, so we’re depending on others to figure out what’s in it regarding discretionary/competitive grant program funding. Here’s some of the nuggets we’re found so far:

  • $80,000,000 for mental and behavioral health training for health care professions, paraprofessionals, and public safety officers.
  • $40,000,000 for health care providers to promote mental and behavioral health among their health professional workforce.
  • $30,000,000 for local substance use disorder services like syringe services programs and other harm reduction interventions.
  • $50,000,000 for local behavioral health needs.
  • $30,000,000 for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s Project AWARE (Advancing Wellness and Resilience in Education), to address mental health issues among school-aged youth.
  • $20,000,000 for youth suicide prevention.
  • $420,000,000 for expansion grants for certified community behavioral health clinics.
  • $128B for state education agencies, 90% to be passed through to local education agencies (school districts), some likely via RFPs.
  • $15B for the Child Care & Development Block Grant program, with much of this to be passed through via RFPs.
  • $1.4B for existing Older Americans Act (OAA) programs.
  • $25B for a new grant program for “restaurants and other food and drinking establishments.” We’ll drink to that! We’ve never written proposals for for-profit restaurants, but we could (we have written proposals for re-entry programs and the like that use their own restaurants for food-service job training).
  • $1.5B for something called the SBA Shuttered Venue Operators Grant program.
  • $7.5B for the CDC to track, distribute, and administer COVID-19 vaccines, some of which is likely be available via RFPs, particularly to Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) and local public health agencies.
  • $7.6B in “flexible emergency COVID-19 funding” for FQHCs, although it’s not clear if this will be by formula or RFP.

We may update this list as more info emerges, and you should watch for press releases from state funding agencies and trade groups in your areas of service delivery for other summaries. If you see good summaries, send them to us.

In 2009, the last time we saw this kind of federal spending, I wrote “Stimulus Bill Passes: Time for Fast and Furious Grant Writing.” That bill was $900M and we wrote our last proposal for funding authorized by it in 2016—eight years after it passed! It’s going to take many years for all of the ARPA funding to wash through the system, so it’ll be raining ARPA RFPs for at least the rest the decade.

Most of what I wrote in 2009 is still true in that the funding agencies usually don’t get more staff, even though they’re suddenly responsible for vastly increased RFP processes, including reviewing the thousands of proposals that will be submitted and administering the thousands of new grants to be made. Federal Program Officers and Budget Officers are going to be overloaded, which likely means less thorough review of proposals and subsequent grant contracts and limited oversight. If you run a nonprofit or public agency, there’ll never be a better time to aggressively seek grants.


  • As grant writers, we’re always amused by new government acronyms. In this case, some 25-year-old recent Ivy League grad, who works for a congressional committee, likely came up with ARPA, though there’s already a DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), which is it itself a major federal grant-making entity. It would be fun if ARPA has new funds for DARPA, like a Matryoshka or Russian Nesting Doll.
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“Currently, [Census] data is not loading properly:” DOL’s YouthBuild FY ’21

Needs assessment experts and data nerds know that factfinder.census.gov, the old primary portal into Census data, is dead, while the new census data portal, data.census.gov, is only somewhat alive. Last year, I started a post about the ways that data.census.gov is broken, but I abandoned it because it was too boring, even for me; last year, data.census.gov was hellaciously slow, often taking 10 seconds for a query (a needs assessment may require dozens or hundreds of queries), and many internal links simply didn’t work. Some of that seems to have been fixed: back then, for example, trying to find specific sub-data sets, like educational attainment, for a given zip code, didn’t work. I sent some feedback to the Census contact person, who was very helpful, and eventually most of the problems disappeared.

But not all, it seems; this year’s DOL YouthBuild NOFA includes a humorous instruction regarding data requirements: pages 84 – 86 offer a 20-step algorithm for acquiring poverty data. That the algorithm has 20 steps and three pages is obviously bizarre: instruction 17 notes, “A table will come up showing the Total Population, the Number in Poverty, and the Poverty Rate. Currently, the data is not loading properly and at first only the overall U.S. data will load and you will not be able to scroll any further to the right to see anything else.” Oh? “Currently, the data is not loading properly:” that seems as if it could be the theme of the new Census interface.

About 10 years ago, there was a popular link-sharing site called Digg, and it introduced a now-notorious redesign that users hated, and those users consequently abandoned it en masse, leading to the rise of Reddit, a now-popular link-sharing site. If Digg had been more careful, it probably would have maintained its previous site design for those who wanted it, while introducing its new site design as a default, but not mandatory, experience. And then Digg would likely have iterated on the new design, figuring out what works. Reddit has somewhat learned this lesson; it now has two interfaces, one primarily living at old.reddit.com, which is maintained for people highly familiar with “the old Reddit,” and a newer one that is available by default at reddit.com. This bifurcation strategy allows a smooth transition between interfaces. The Census didn’t follow this strategy, and instead killed the old interface before the new one was really ready. Thus, bugs, like the bugs I’ve noticed, and bugs like those the Dept. of Labor noticed and mentioned specifically in YouthBuild NOFA. The more general lesson is fairly clear: be wary of big user interface changes. If you need Census data, though, you’ll have to use the interface, as is, since it’s the only one available.

For some reason—perhaps latent masochism?—Isaac continues to use MS Office 365 Outlook (not the free version) as an email client, instead of Apple’s Mail.app, or Thunderbird, and he tells me that every time he opens Outlook, he gets an invitation to try “the new Outlook” interface. So far, he’s resisted, but he also points out that most change is positive: when S + A started in 1993, there was effectively no commercial Internet, and the only way to get Census data was to go to Census Office, if you were near a big enough city, city hall, or a large library, where it was possible to thumb through the impenetrable Census books and maps. After a year or two in business, some vendor got the idea of putting the 1990 Census data on CDs (remember those), for quite a high price. Even though S + A was struggling to control costs, he bought the CDs, since they were better than hours in a Census Office or library. But then he had to buy, and install, CD drives in the Pentium PCs (remember those) we used. A couple of years later, he stumbled into a Census data portal set up by a random university, which worked! So, he tossed the CDs. When the 2000 Census came out, the feds essentially copied the university’s interface, creating factfinder.gov, and all was well until data.census.gov came alone. It’ll probably be better than the old interface, at some point.

Complaining is easy and making things better is hard. In the Internet era, both complainers and makers have been empowered, and I appreciate the difference between the two. People who have fundamental responsibility for a product, service, or organization, including the responsibility for making hard decisions that aren’t going to be popular with everyone, have a different perspective than those who can just complain and move on. So I don’t want to be a drive-by complainer, as so many are on “social” media, which seems poisonous to institutional formation and coherence. But, despite those caveats, the instruction from DOL regarding the Census being broken is perversely funny.