Posted on 3 Comments

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.

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

  1. I just love your writing style…always makes me smile!
    Thank you for such wonderful up to date information!

    1. Glad you’re amused!

  2. Thank you for the breakdown.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *