The impact of the Trump election juggernaut and the subsequent laser-like focus of DOGE on the federal grant-making process has been extraordinary. While this is partly due to Trump’s election promises, the larger part of this is surely due to Elon’s efforts to apply the fine scale and immediate problem-solving approach of tech companies to the moribund federal bureaucratic behemoth. Still, Elon and his band of merry men (am I the only one that can visualize Elon as Errol Flynn as Robin Hood in green tights?) have put the brakes on the issuance of most FY ’25 RFPs and NOFOs (I’ll use NOFO in the rest of this post, as this term has eclipsed RFP in use for reasons I don’t understand).
Having been a grant writer since dinosaurs walked the earth, it’s not all that unusual to see pauses in the federal grant-making process,* which usually occur during presidential transitions like Reagan’s 1st term in 1981 and Clinton’s 2nd term in 1997. For Reagan, attempts to change grant-making policies were mostly ideologically based, while for Clinton, it was political survival after Republicans took control of the House for the first time since 1928.
Still, I’ve never experienced the level of disruption in the federal grant-making system that has been taking place since November. While Trump & Co. did not take over until January 20, the federal fiscal year begins on October 1 and it always takes three or four months for significant NOFOs to be issued, which of course dovetails with the advent of the Trump administration and unleashing of DOGE. Ergo, no big NOFOs published this past winter.
Although few FY ’25 NOFOs have been issued, the logjam seems to be breaking, as major NOFOs finally started appearing in mid-April, including the following:
- Three Office on Violence Against Women (OVW) NOFOs with $208.5M available
- DOJ COPS School Violence Prevention Program (SVPP) with $73M
- DOT Safe Streets for All (SS4A) with $982M
- NEH National Garden of American Heroes Program with $30M for individual sculptors
- Build America Bureau reissue of the FY ’24 Regional Infrastructure Program with $20M
That’s $1.3 billion up for grabs! As the late Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois put it in the late ‘60s, “a billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.”
We expect the federal funding floodgates to soon open with a tsunami of NOFOs coming forth. DOGE and the departments are clearly ending some pauses. Congress is also likely to pass a version of Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill. While this will be an omnibus bill with several components, one component will be a Continuing Resolution (CR) that adjusts FY ’25 and FY ’26 appropriations. The combination of pauses ending and the CR passing will certainly lead to very rapid NOFO issuance across all federal departments.
We’re advising our nonprofit clients to gird their loins in anticipation of this imminent deluge of NOFOs—given how late we are in FY ’25, it’s likely that the time between NOFO issuance and submission deadline will be much shorter than usual. So, do whatever you can to prepare for NOFOs you expect. For example, one-third of all FQHCs are required to compete annually to keep their Section 330 grants. HRSA usually starts issuing up to seven Service Areas Competition (SAC) NOFOs in mid-May with deadlines from July to December. If the SAC NOFOs aren’t published until June or July, the deadlines will be shorter this year.
* Reminds me of Joni Mitchell’s wonderful song Free Man in Paris: “Everybody’s in it for their own gain, stoking the star maker machinery behind the popular song,” changing to “stoking the grant maker machinery.”
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