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“Your methods are unorthodox”

As GWC readers know, getting information about state and local grants is often tricky. Every state and municipality is different, and, like foundations, few if any make any effort at standardization or the user experience; most just assume that the usual suspects will apply for grants, and consequently they end up forming de facto cartels. In theory, too, all government grant information is also public information, but that’s a little like the theory that DMV employees are public servants who work on behalf of taxpayers: connecting theory to practice can be hard or nonexistent—naive visitors to the DMV learn.

Anyway. I spent some time attempting to get into the Wisconsin “Division of Public Health Grants and Contracting (GAC) Application” page, which is stashed behind a password wall for no reason I can discern. In the process I ended up emailing “Yvette A Smith,” a contracting specialist, to request access, and in reply, she told me that “Your request is unorthodox.” While not quite as good as “Your methods are unsound,” I did actually laugh out loud; I do like to imagine I’m the grant-world equivalent of Captain Willard talking to Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now.

And Yvette is right: our methods are unorthodox and we do disturb the fabric of the grant/proposal world. That’s part of the reason we’re effective.

Still, I had no idea that there’s an orthodoxy in the State of Wisconsin. And if there is, what is that orthodoxy? Is it John 16:10 that describes how users should access GAC Application information? Or does orthodoxy emerge from other texts?

Alas, I didn’t inquire that far, and I also never quite got access to the GAC Application Page, but I was able to find the information I needed elsewhere. Still, I did learn just a little about the quality of governance in Wisconsin. A famous paper looks at “Cultures of Corruption: Evidence From Diplomatic Parking Tickets,” and the authors find that “diplomats from high corruption countries (based on existing survey-based indices) have significantly more parking violations, and these differences persist over time.” I wonder if my own experiences interacting with local and state governments are similar: the worse the quality of random bureaucrats, the worse the overall level of governance.