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Congress passes gun reform bill: News for nimble nonprofits and public agencies

Our usually dyspeptic Congress recently passed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act AKA Gun Reform Bill, which has funding for new discretionary grant programs in it. Since the advent of COVID in 2020, Congress has passed a series of trillion dollar-plus spending bills containing many grant opportunities for nonprofits, public agencies, and businesses involved in stuff like electric vehicle batteries, geothermal energy, solar panel research and construction, and much more. We know, as S + A has been at, near, or over full capacity for most of the past 2.5 years; we thought this flood would slow, as it did in 2010 following the 2009 Stimulus Bill. But we were wrong, which is great news for us grant writers—and for nonprofits and public agencies.

In addition to a raft of reforms aimed at (pun intended) rising gun violence, the 80-page Gun Reform Bill has $750M to “incentivize” states to pass Red Flag laws. Translated from Washington-speak, this likely means big formula grants to the states, which will in turn likely pass through much of their federal funding into RFPs for local agencies to “do something.” The “something” won’t be all that important, as the goal will be to get the money to the streets. The Bill also allocates billions to schools and communities (this means CBOs, or community-based organizations) to expand mental health programs. These new funding rivers—they’re too big to be mere “streams”—will likely flow through the Department of Education, SAMHSA, HRSA, OJJDP, HUD, etc., in the form of RFPs over the next few years.

Other grant ornaments will emerge from the Gun Reform Bill, proposed Climate Emergency executive actions, and additional legislation this and next year that addresses emerging problems. The feds like to throw money at problems, call the money “important action,” and see what sticks. Around the time of the Columbine shooting in 1999, President Clinton and Congress ramped up funding for odd things like “Midnight Basketball,” as well as one of our favorites, the 21st Century Community Learning Centers (21st CCLC) program, and many other programs that were supposed to improve school mental health services, mentoring, and provide safe after school hours activities. Since then, we’ve seen the Sandy Hook school massacre, the Uvalde school massacre, and many others. But we’re doing something. In the first decade of the 21st Century, we wrote at least 50 funded 21st CCLC and similar grants.

The FY ’23 federal budget year begins October 1, and smart local agencies will start planning now to get their piece of the mental health and related grant pies. Even if your agency has little behavioral health experience, this is the time to develop some and form partnerships to make your grants applications more believable than they might be otherwise.

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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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The federal budget in the age of Trump: Round up the usual suspects

The New York Times says that “Popular Domestic Programs Face Ax Under First Trump Budget.” Those listed include the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Legal Services Corporation, AmeriCorps, National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), and National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). With the exception of AmeriCorps, which wasn’t yet born, the rest are the usual suspects, which have been proposed for the chopping block on and off since David Stockman* was Director of the Office of Management and Budget in 1981. I’ve seen this movie before, and I’m highly confident that, after the Congressional inquisition is over, NEH, NEA and the rest will ride off from Capitol Hill like Keyser Söze at the end of The Usual Suspects.

You might be surprised to learn that Congress last passed an actual Federal budget in 1998! Since then, Congress has used a variety of legislative tricks to “pass” non-budget budgets, including Continuing Resolutions (CRs), department budget authorization bills, and budget reconciliation bills to enable senators and representatives to avoid going on the record voting for or against an actual budget. This whole mess is tied up with the headache-inducing need to pass a bill increasing the Federal debt limit every six months or so.

In March, we’ll get to experience this exercise in political theater again, as the Trump administration will likely propose a revised FY ’17 budget (not to be confused with FY ’18 budget coming along later in the year). As reported by the NYT and others, this revised budget will likely propose a decrease in FY ’17 budget authorizations for selected discretionary domestic Federal spending agencies/programs like NEA and its pals. This is opposed to the usual practice of “budget hawks” to propose reductions in the rate of increase in Federal spending, due to the Feds using baseline budgeting (another headache-inducing concept) rather than zero-based budgeting.

My guess is that few discretionary programs will receive actual cuts and none will be eliminated (see one of our most popular posts, “Zombie Funding—Six Tana Leaves for Life, Nine for Motion,” to learn how Federal programs usually return from the dead). That’s because every Federal discretionary funding/grant program has constituencies in every Congressional District—along with an army of lobbyists.

Let’s use NEA as an example. NEA funds symphonies, theater groups, art museums, etc., everywhere. These are nonprofits, the boards and docent corps of which are composed mostly of well-off locals, who might be married to Congresspeople or their donors. They’re likely to be members of the same country clubs, churches/synagogues, and Chambers of Commerce as Congresspeople. That means Congressman Horsefeathers is not only going to be beaten up by lobbyists and donors but is going to an earful at the breakfast table.

As a young grant writer during the Reagan ascendancy, I learned that—despite the fevered rhetoric you’re going to soon hear and the attempt of the Trump administration to cut something—most grant programs will squeeze through. In contemplating Federal budget cuts, I use the Economic Development Administration (EDA) as my yardstick. EDA, the most overtly political of Federal grant-making agencies, has been around since 1965. Every so often, an administration or Congress threatens this small nimble dinosaur with a budget meteor, but EDA always dodges. I won’t take the latest budget battle seriously until EDA dies. I won’t bring up the real budget brontosauruses like HUD and the Department of Education. They’ve survived Presidents Reagan and Bush the Younger, as well Speaker Newt.


* Stockman now shows up in infomercials hawking various doomsday economic books (or gold), but he actually wrote a terrific political autobiography, The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed. I read this in the mid-80s and it’s relevant once more.

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We Might Start Seeing RFPs Again, Now That the Latest Spending Bill Passed the House

Sharp-eyed readers of our email grant newsletter know that the last few months have seen few juicy federal RFPs appear. That’s not because we’re not looking for them—we are—but because Congress’s deadlock has meant that few federal agencies have been eager to put on RFP processes for programs that until funding for this fiscal year is assured.

But as of December 11, Congress finally passed a spending bill—and it doesn’t even appear to be a Continuing Resolution (CR), which has been the primary way Congress has conducted business over the last half decade. You might notice that the last link in the preceding sentence goes back to 2010.

It’s hard to say whether we’ll see more CRs in the next two years, but with Republicans controlling the House and Senate in the next Congress while a Democrat holds the White House, we’re betting on “yes.”

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Sequestration Still Looms Over the Grant World: Two Months and Counting

I wrote about the potential impacts of the then-looming fiscal cliff a few weeks ago. At the last minute—actually, about a day after the last minute—Congress and President Obama awoke from their torpor and passed legislation, which what’s left of our media immediately hailed as “preventing the nation from going off the fiscal cliff.”

Well, not quite.

Lost in the fiscal cliff hubbub was the fact the fiscal cliff was actually a two-step fall. The first step downward—massive tax increases on almost all Americans—was indeed averted. The second part of the Cliff, sequestration, however, wasn’t addressed.

Rather, it was kicked down the road by about two months. As I pointed out in my earlier post, sequestration will impact the wonderful world of grants much more than tax increases. The former means significant reductions in discretionary grant funding, while the latter means more “money for nothing and chicks for free.”

Over the next few weeks, the battle lines over sequestration will form as the new Fiscal Cliff takes shape. This, too this will be a two-step Fiscal Cliff. Step one is our old pal sequestration, while the second part will be raising the federal debt ceiling. While the two steps are not inherently intertwined, the timing virtually ensures that the debates over both will be.

If you’re with a nonprofit that’s drifted back into somnolence because the Fiscal Cliff has been averted, shake yourself awake because the roller coaster is about to start again. In many ways,* coming to agreement on the largely non-raising of taxes was fairly easy for Congress and President Obama to agree on, compared to the coming battles over sequestration and raising the debt limit.

While understanding the byzantine politics of these two issues is above my pay grade, the eventual outcomes will likely include either decreases in federal spending on discretionary grant programs or, at a minimum, a reduction in the rate of increase. Either course will have significant impacts for grant seekers.


* Free proposal lead-in phrase in here.

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HUD Issues the FY ’12 Indian Community Development Block Grant (ICDBG) NOFA Not Long After the FY ’11 NOFA

HUD just issued the FY ’12 Indian Community Development Block Grant (ICDBG) NOFA (Notice of Funding Availability, which is HUD-speak for RFP). There’s about $61 million available for federally recognized Tribes, Alaskan Native Villages and selected Native American organizations. This is a great opportunity for eligible Native American applicants to fund housing, economic development and community facility projects, and maximum grants range from $600,000 to $5,500,000, depending on the location and number of persons impacted. The question is, why am I blogging about it, since it seems like another run-of-the-mill federal grant process?

The answer is in the timing of the NOFA release and deadline.

The timing issue caught my eye because the FY ’11 ICDBG deadline was June 15. The FY ’12 ICDBG NOFA was released on October 4 and the deadline is January 4, so two “annual” funding cycles will be completed within a year! Faithful readers will recall that I wrote several posts in halcyon days of the Stimulus Bill passing in early 2009, including February 2009’s Stimulus Bill Passes: Time for Fast and Furious Grant Writing. In it, I correctly predicted that the feds would have more than a little trouble shoveling $800 billion out of the door.

The Stimulus Bill also distorted the more or less predictable flow of other discretionary grant programs like ICDBG; while the Stimulus Bill unleashed a huge quantity of additional grant funds, there were few, if any, additional personnel to manage the process, as I observed then:

My experience with Federal employees is that they work slower, not faster, under pressure, and there is no incentive whatsoever for a GS-10 to burn the midnight oil. Federal staffers are just employees who likely don’t share the passion of the policy wonks in the West Wing or the grant applicants. They just do their jobs, and, since there are protected by Civil Service, they cannot be speeded up. Also, there are no bonuses in the Federal system for work above and beyond the call of duty.

The nearly back-to-back release of ICDBG NOFAs is likely the result of the Stimulus Bill backlog—something like the boa constrictor eating an elephant in Saint-Exupéry’s charming novella, The Little Prince. ICDBG-eligible applicants had to wait for the FY ’11 grants to be digested, and then they have the opportunity to apply all over again a few months later.

The lack of a federal budget for three years and the reliance on Continuing Resolutions (CRs) to fund federal agencies likely doesn’t help. While the media focuses on the upcoming election and never-ending economic challenges, Congress passes appropriation bills using CRs, which allows FY ’12 funds, like ICDBG, to become available. You can expect a flood of backlogged federal programs to issue RFPs in the next few months.

Given the chaos in the federal budgeting process, it seems like a good bet to apply for any grant programs that come along now because the funding cycles for ICDBG and lots of other programs are pretty screwed up. In the case of ICDBG, I have no idea when the FY ’13 ICDBG NOFA will appear, but there’s an opportunity for a second bite of the apple this year. It seems to me that any ICDBG-eligible entity should bite that apple (or is it a salmon? I leave it to readers to decide).

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As Predicted in January 2010, the “R” Word, Rescission, is Finally Here

Every January for the past three years, I’ve written a post about why it’s a great time to apply for federal and state grants. Here I go again: this post explains why nimble organizations will start the New Year by kick-starting their grant writing efforts, albeit for a different reason than in past Januarys.

Now that Congress is back in session, the federal deficit and spending are at the front and center of political debates. Patrick O’Connor and Janet Hook covered this in their January 3,2011 Wall Street Journal article, “Congress Targets Spending”. They write:

. . . Republicans in the House say they plan to move on to offer a far more sweeping package of “recissions,” or elimination of spending previously approved, that will aim to bring domestic spending back to where it was before Mr. Obama became president.

Ah, there’s the “R” word, rescission.* Faithful readers will recall that I predicted this in a post I wrote almost a year ago, “Federal Budget Freeze Prospect Making You Shiver? Don’t Panic Until You Hear the “R” Word: Rescission.” As I wrote then, rescission should “strike fear into your hearts” because the potential creates vast uncertainty in federal grant writing and state grant seeking (many state grants are derived from formula federal grants). I have no idea which grant program budget authorizations, if any, will actually be rescinded—which requires making it through the House, Senate and presidential signature—but, given the tenor of the political debate, I assume at least some will.

One of the things that makes the prospect of rescissions this year so curious is the fact that Congress never adopted a FY 2011 budget, opting instead for a series of Continuing Resolutions, the latest of which will expire in March (see this recent post on the subject, “No FY 2011 Federal Budget? As Is Said in Jamaica, No Problem Mon!“). Thus, rescissions could begin in the most recent CR, which is more or less the FY 2010 budget, or may be included in a FY 2011 budget, if a budget is actually adopted in March.

For grant seekers, the important part in all of this budget mumbo-jumbo is the critical need to respond to every RFP that appears in the next few months, because the program may be rescinded or otherwise subject to the budget axe. Federal and state agencies will be scrambling to issue RFPs ahead of possible rescissions because they know that the applicant pool will become a built-in lobbying force against rescissions. Every program officers want greater budget authority, not less.

In essence, the more RFPs that are issued and the more applicants there are for programs, the lower the probability that rescissions will harm a funding agency’s program. In counterpoint, some nonprofits will be scared away from responding to RFPs because they think their funding might be rescinded. The nonprofits that apply despite the potential for rescission will have a better chance for funding, particularly if they scream at their representatives to preserve budget authority for programs of interest. Since grant applicants are not shy and elected officials, regardless of party, are inherently interested in spending OPM (“other people’s money”), there should be lots of grants for those organizations who hop on every grant bus that trundles by in the coming months.

One possible program that’s a good target for rescission appeared in this week’s e-mail grant newsletter: HRSA’s Affordable Care Act: Health Center Planning Grants. It’s a planning grant program, which means that it won’t affect services that are already being delivered directly to people. More importantly, however, it’s also part of the Affordable Care Act, which lots of incoming congresspeople oppose, and one way to attack previously passed legislation is by refusing to fund it—or to rescind whatever money is already allocated to it. Only $10 M is available, and the maximum grant amount is just $80,000. Rescinding its funding wouldn’t cause a lot of problems but would show symbolic unhappiness about the Affordable Care Act.


* There seems to be a bit of confusion about spelling “rescission.” My spell checker likes “rescission,” but sharp-eyed readers will note the WSJ spells it “recission.” To paraphrase one of my favorite actor / singers (oh, and he also danced a bit), Fred Astaire to Ginger Rogers in “Shall We Dance”, “You like potato and I like potaeto,You like tomato and I like tomaeto; You like recission, I like rescission; Potato, potaeto, tomato, tomaeto, recission, rescission! Let’s [not] call the whole thing off!”. Given the tough economic times, it seems appropriate to think of a song from a 1937 movie.

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Be Nice to Your Program Officer: Reprogrammed / Unobligated Federal Funds Mean Christmas May Come Early and Often This Year

I hope faithful readers who are also federal grantees have been nice to their Program Officers, because this could be the year that Christmas comes early and often.

I recently wrote about the unfolding FY 2011 federal budget fiasco. While cruising in the droptop to Palm Spring this weekend to visit relatives, I got to thinking about the next step: what happens when the Republicans win control of at least one house of Congress? Regardless of one’s politics, this looks certain. We’ll have a lame-duck Congress for a few weeks, during which a budget is unlikely to pass, and then an all-out political brawl when the new Congress starts fulminating on January 3. I’m guessing that the budget won’t get resolved until around March, which means the feds will probably operate under Continuing Resolutions for another three to six months.

If you have a direct federal grant and have been a good boy or girl this year by obligating your grant funds, filing timely reports and doing more or less what your grant agreement calls for (e.g., offering family support services but not leasing Porsches or going on site visits to Bimini), Santa may drop in. Provided that the stars align perfectly by having a full-scale budget rumpus unfold, preventing budget adoption by the lame duck congress, the political appointees who run federal agencies (e.g., the Under Secretary of Education for Undersecretarial Affairs) will quickly realize that they need to spend existing budget authority under their Continuing Resolutions ASAP or risk losing the money when the Federal budget is finally adopted.

In some cases, this will mean hurried-up RFPs processes, like the Department of Treasury’s CDFI program, HUD’s Healthy Homes Production Production Program (open, but with short deadlines), and the Department of Education’s Talent Search program (expected to be issued 10/22 with a deadline of 12/9—see theDraft Talent Search RFP for a glimpse of Days of Future Passed.* In other cases, however, the Program Officer may skip the RFP process entirely, however, and request applications from existing grantees. If you are a grantee, don’t be surprised if you get a call or email from your Program Officer in the next few weeks or months asking for a proposal with a week or two turnaround. While you’ll have to submit a technically correct proposal and be willing to accept whatever offer is made, you’ll have no competition. Just submit the proposal, sign the contract, and off you go!

In addition to trying to spend existing budget authority, Program Officers also sometimes have returned grant funds they need to “re-program.” This happens when a grantee screws up their grant, and, assuming that the grantee hasn’t obligated (there’s that word again) their funds, the Program Officer cancels the contract and takes the unobligated money back. To avoid losing the money when the next budget arrives, the Program Officer will sometimes unload the funds on another grantee she likes.

We wrote a funded HUD Lead-Based Paint Hazard Control (LBPHC) Program grant in the FY 2009 funding round, which was one of only about 30 grants awarded. Last week, I was talking to this client, and he told me that one of the other grantees had already had their grant pulled because of inactivity. The grantee simply couldn’t get their program launched and the HUD Program Officer lost patience. This gives the LBPHC Program Officer another $2 or $3 million for re-programming. I told our client to be ready for the re-programming call—and so should you!

I’ve experienced the joy of re-programming a few times before I was a consultant. When I was Development Manager for the City of Inglewood in the 1980s (per 2Pac, “Inglewood always up to no good”, I wrote about $20 million in funded FAA grants to support redevelopment under the city’s Airport Noise Control and Land Use Compatibility (ANCLUC) program. This was during the Reagan/Congress budget battles and I was invited to submit a last minute ANCLUC proposal once or twice when my Program Officer got the shanks (note for non-golfers: this is different from “being shanked” in prison).

I’ve heard similar tales from clients and others over the years. Between re-programmed funds and the irresistible urge of Program Officers to shovel money out before the budget door slams shuts, a perfect storm for multiple Christmases is brewing. If you get such a call and feel like sharing, post a comment and we’ll keep you anonymous. Let the grant holidays begin.


* This over-the-top pretentious Moody Blues concept album reminds me of my early grant writing days, as I listened to it about a thousand times in 1970s while I scribbled proposals on to seemingly endless legal pads—not an iPad.

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HUD’s Lead-Based Paint Hazard Control Program (LBPHC) Program Explained

HUD’s FY 2010 NOFA for the Lead-Based Paint Hazard Control Program (LBPHC) confuses many applicants. We’ve written at least six funded LBPHC grants, so we’re familiar with it. The program is actually simple: it funds the remediation (not necessarily removal) of lead-based paint in privately owned housing occupied by low-income folks.

Applicants, however, often have trouble figuring out how to efficiently spend the grant funds. Lead-based paint remediation usually costs about $15,000 per unit remediated. To make a LBPHC program work, applicants should propose using the LBPHC funds in conjunction with their housing rehabilitation program.

That’s the real secret of the program. Virtually every city has had some form of housing rehab program since the Nixon administration, using a combination of HUD HOME formula grants, CDBG entitlements, state funds, or who knows what. The rehab programs usually entice homeowners and landlords to fix up the housing units by offering small grants for the very low-income (below 50% of area median income or “AMI”) and subsidized loans for low-income and moderate-income (50% to 120% of AMI, depending on the jurisdiction).

The real problem for lead-based paint programs is invariably that the City of Owatonna wants Mrs. Smith the homeowner to fix code violations, remediate lead paint, etc., while Mrs. Jones wants granite countertops, stainless steel appliances, and maybe faster Internet access. The city has trouble spending its rehab funds because Mrs. Smith doesn’t want to borrow money to do things that won’t impress her friends and neighbors.

What to do? The City (or other applicant) gets a LBPHC grant and bungie cords it to their existing rehab program. Now Mrs. Smith can get $15,000 or so in LBPHC sub-grant funds to remediate the lead hazards that the city inspector wants her to do and can use the rehab loan to buy her granite countertops.

The lead remediation grant can be used to entice Mrs. Smith to take the rehab loan. Now everyone is happy, including the local contractors who have some work while waiting around for the economy to improve. As long as a city doesn’t try to run LBPHC as a standalone program, but instead combines it with their rehab effort, HUD will love it. So will everyone in town. It’s remarkable to me how many calls I’ve had over the years from city officials who do not get this idea until I explain it. The ones who follow our direction usually get funded and have great success with the program.

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Federal Budget Freeze Prospect Making You Shiver? Don’t Panic Until You Hear the “R” Word: Rescission

President Obama highlighted his proposed partial “freeze” on discretionary federal spending during his State of the Union address last week, which set off a flurry of predictable wrangling among Democratic and Republican members of Congress (for a pretty good summary of what’s going on, see Democrats, Republicans Spar Over Cutting Deficit). While talk of budget freezes may make most grant applicants start to get the sniffles, there is little to worry about at the moment.

So far, President Obama is talking about freezing some domestic spending programs in FY ’11, which doesn’t start until October 1. He also seems to love spending for things like education, stimulating jobs, green energy, etc. The proposed FY ’11 budget, which debuted February 1, shows increases in a number of discretionary programs along with freezes in others. But remember that appropriations for most domestic discretionary programs in the current FY ’10 budget are wildly higher than in the FY ’09 budget. At the moment, there are unprecedented amounts of money available for all kinds of initiatives. As I wrote last September in “Graffiti, Windmills, CAP Agencies, and an Answer to the Question As to Whether This is 1975 or 1965,” “This really is the best of times for grant applicants, so let’s all party like its 1965.” Or, to paraphrase Max in Where the Wild Things Are,* “Let the wild grant writing rumpus continue.”

Despite the happy talk above, however, there is one not-so-minor thing to worry about—the dreaded “R” word. No, not the recession “R” word, which, as I have pointed out repeatedly, is actually good for grant writing. I’m talking about “rescission”. Rescission should strike fear into your hearts, as shown in the following Congressional definition:

“Rescission–The cancellation of budget authority previously provided by Congress. The Impoundment Control Act of 1974 specifies that the President may propose to Congress that funds be rescinded. If both Houses have not approved a rescission proposal (by passing legislation) within 45 days of continuous session, any funds being withheld must be made available for obligation.”

Since the Democrats control both houses of Congress, and assuming that President Obama is good at herding cats, he could propose rescission of any authorized spending program anytime he wants to. As with so many aspects of grant writing, I actually experienced a budget rescission when I was a Community Organizer Intern in 1972 in North Minneapolis, as noted in my first post, “They Say a Fella Never Forgets His First Grant Proposal.” When I started work, one of my first tasks was to explain to low-income homeowner applicants for home rehabilitation loans that they could not get their money because the funds had been rescinded by President Nixon. At that time, there was nothing Congress could do about a rescission, which led to the 1974 law that requires Congress to go along with a presidential rescission. Given the hysteria that is building over the huge budget deficits, compounded by the upcoming election, a successful rescission is quite possible, and much more worrisome that supposed spending freezes.

This means that if your organization—nonprofit, public agency or eligible business—is thinking about applying for a grant, stop thinking and start writing.


* I have fond memories of reading “Where the Wild Things Are” to Jake and my other kids when they were two or three. It’s one of the best children’s books ever.