Now that the interminable 2024 election is in the rear view mirror, it’s time to consider its impact on the wonderful world of grants (and give thanks that the flood of political junk texts and mailers have stopped). While I know many of my readers are unhappy with the outcome, don’t despair, at least with respect to seeking grants. Elections come and go but the grant-making process is eternal.
It seems that during almost every election, the media tells us some version of “this is most important election of our lifetime.” Sometimes this hyperbole rings true, and 2024 is one of these times. The most recent election that seemed historically consequential was 2008, but I’m old enough to remember 1980, which was a true watershed. Let’s hop into Rocky & Bullwinkle’s WABAC Machine to return to those thrilling days of yesteryear.
In the runup to the 1980 election, I was the Grants Coordinator for the City of Lynwood in LA County. I’d grown up in a poor immigrant DFL* family in Minneapolis and was a strong Carter supporter. I shared an office with the Finance Director, who was a rabid Reagan Republican. We had many spirited discussions about the election, but we were still able to have lunch together, go to happy hour, etc. Those quaint days of polite but firm political disagreements are long gone, much to our collective detriment.
In early 1981, I went to Washington DC for a NAHRO (National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials) conference and some lobbying on the Hill. The keynote speaker was a senior Reagan HUD appointee talking to about 1,000 of us city bureaucrats in a hotel ballroom. We sat in stunned silence as this dude ticked off the many proposed budget cuts to federal discretionary grant programs (our “mother’s milk”). I was so shaken that I decided to abandon my grant writing career and became Redevelopment Manager for the nearby City of Inglewood (immortalized by Tupac in California Love: “Inglewood always up to no good”). I was convinced that the era of big government grants was over. Boy was I wrong.
While there were significant cuts to grant budgets among most federal agencies for the first few years of the Reagan administration, it didn’t take long for Congress to start bringing back funding for old discretionary grant programs while adding lots of new ones. By 1985 it was business as usual and, much to my chagrin, I would find myself writing some proposals for Inglewood in addition to my other duties.**
What happened? To find out, read David A. Stockman’s excellent 1986 memoir, The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed. Stockman had been a wunderkind Republican MI congressman (similar to Congressman Mike Waltz today) and became the OMB Director in the Reagan administration as a starry-eyed idealist. Within a few years, the usual Washington suspects had ground him down into a political fetal position. Along the way, radical campaign ideas like shutting down the Departments of Education and HUD quickly disappeared into the ether.
Another later example, from the Bush administration, was Congressman Jack Kemp. He could have had any cabinet position, but chose HUD Secretary, as he was convinced that he could “reform it.” Kemp failed badly, as I discussed in this 2008 post, Reformers come and go, but HUD abides.
As I write this, there’s no way to know what the Trump administration will try to do with discretionary grant funding levels, but I assume it’ll be some version of 1981, with lots of thunderous pronouncements from newly appointed cabinet officials that ignore the reality of the sausage-making (or, more politely, log-rolling) enterprise that is Congress. Keep in mind that both Democrats and Republicans love to fund grant programs, albeit often for different priorities.
Congress has yet to pass any FY ’25 (the new FY started Oct. 1) appropriation bills (AKA Continuing Resolutions or “CRs”), so the departments are still operating under the FY ’24 authorizations. The lame duck Congress will pass FY ’25 CRs by mid-December, which will likely mirror FY ’24. In January, the new Republican-controlled Congress will try to amend these through the arcane Budget Reconciliation process. This initial effort to reduce federal discretionary spending will probably be at least somewhat successful in that many grant programs will see reduced appropriations or even be zeroed out for FY ’25. But—and this is a big but—Congress rarely eliminates grant programs, even if $0 is allocated for one or more fiscal years. They go into hibernation, and as I wrote in 2007, become Zombie Funding – Six Tana Leaves for Life, Nine for Motion. At any time, Congress can re-fund a grant program, re-animating the zombie.
Coming back to the present in the WABAC machine, what is a nonprofit to do? Get busy and start submitting proposals to any remotely appropriate federal RFP you spot. This is how we often describe the process to clients. Imagine RFPs are buses, and you’re standing at the corner of Grant Boulevard and Greed Street in a bus shelter. Best to get on any bus going more or less in your direction because that bus may not drive by again. This is particularly true for any RFPs related to progressive issues like green anything, carbon reduction, DEIA, etc., as these will be first on the chopping block. So, stop feeling sorry for yourself and get busy. If you need help, S + A is tan, fit, and ready to rock ‘n’ roll. To quote one of my fave ’90s movies, Get Shorty: “Maybe it’s time you got on a plane, flew out to L.A. and took a meeting with Mr. Zimm.” We be Mr. Zimm.
* There is no Democratic Party in Minnesota. It’s called the Democratic Farmer-Labor (DFL) Party, which was formed by then Minneapolis Mayor Hubert Humphrey in 1944 to co-opt the populist and socialist Farmer-Labor Party through a merger.
** If you’re a good grant writer and manage to land a non-grant writing job, don’t admit that you’re a grant writer to the new boss. Otherwise, you’ll end up like me in Inglewood, writing boring job training proposals for another department instead of making the big redevelopment deals I wanted to work on.