Grants | The Contracting Education Academy

After years of absorbing cuts or flat spending levels, most federal agencies will soon face a novel dilemma: spending a massive influx of money with only a few months to get it out the door.

A recent agreement struck by congressional leadership and signed into law by President Trump boosted non-defense discretionary spending for agencies by $63 billion in fiscal 2018. The measure also included a continuing resolution through March 23 to buy lawmakers time to write line-by-line appropriations, meaning a forthcoming omnibus bill will give agencies only about six months to spend the new funding before it expires Oct. 1. Such a tight timeline could prove problematic for agencies and put pressure on many areas of their operations, according to former federal budgeters.

“This will tax grant making, contract professionals, hiring professionals,” said Robert Shea, a former associate director for administration and government performance at the Office of Management and Budget in the George W. Bush administration. “This is going to tax every facet of the agencies just to make sure they’re spending wisely.”

Keep reading this article at: http://www.govexec.com/management/2018/02/agencies-will-race-clock-to-spend-massive-influx-of-money/146112

Two academics who set out to analyze government grants to nonprofit organizations found that the databases housing that information continue to resist easy use.

The federal government posts onto USAspending.gov data on awards and sub-awards (grants of federal dollars made by an intermediary such as a state government), but when Jesse Lecy of Georgia State University and Jeremy Thornton of Samford University attempted to study 2012 data, they found significant data limitations.

In a Nov. 25 paper, the two academics say their first hurdle was to identify nonprofits within data sets about recipients of federal money, a task made difficult by the fact that the Federal Assistance Award Data System and the Federal Procurement Data System record entities according to DUNS numbers. The Internal Revenue Service tracks entities according to EIN numbers.

Having access to EINs was important to the researchers, since they wanted to match USAspending.gov data taken from FAADS and FPDS to nonprofit financial information held by the National Center for Charitable Statistics, which uses the publicly available EINs as its database unique identifier. The center classifies charities according to the National Taxonomy of Exempt Entities; correlating federal recipients to their NTEE major category would allow the researchers to identify which sectors receive the most federal support.

Keep reading this article at: http://www.fiercegovernmentit.com/story/study-finds-limitations-federal-grant-data/2013-12-01

Agencies will have to race the clock to spend massive influx of money

After years of absorbing cuts or flat spending levels, most federal agencies will soon face a novel dilemma: spending a massive influx of money with only a few months to get it out the door.

Study finds limitations in federal grant data

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