Behind the Curtain at TCG

GCN story on GAO report

This GCN article is a little misleading, making GAO's report sound like a condemnation of Grants.gov, which it doesn't appear to be to me. While Grants.gov comes in for some criticism in GAO's report, it is not the root of all the issues that GCN highlights. I'll write more about this tomorrow.

S.2590 approved by Senate committee

The Washington Post reports today that S.2590 was approved by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee last Thursday. A fella from Forrester Research claims that it would be "feasible" but "a huge undertaking," natch, primarily because of the political implications associated with publishing contracts and grants awards information. The Forrester analyst notes that '"Vendors don't want their competitors to know what they're doing and what they're winning,"' and indeed this is likely to be true.

This comment belies a pretty serious misconception, though. Most people, I think, believe that government spends most of its money on contracts and, consequently, that funding should be scrutinized to the nth degree. As we discovered at the NGP, grants accounted for $441 billion (21.45%) of the Federal government’s spending in 2003 while procurements constituted only $327.4 billion (15.9%). (Since 2003 grant funding has been increasing and is now estimated at $540 billion per year.)

So if we want to better monitor how government is spending our money (and it is our money), greater emphasis should be placed on the transparency of grant awards.

The above statistics neatly illustrate a little-recognized fact: grants are the means through which the people's wishes are realized, while contracts are the means through which those wishes are supported. Think of it this way: the FAA can contract with me with build a system to track how the agency is funding airport construction, but will issue a grant to a state or city to fund the actual building of that airport.

Contracts support grants -- and grants constitute far greater amounts than contracts ever will.

So S.2590 proceeds apace. And while we're on the subject, can someone please translate this, the note describing the last major action on the bill: "Ordered to be reported with an amendment in the nature of a substitute favorably." What the heck does that mean?!

[Update, 7/31/06, 11:10] GovExec has also posted a story on this bill's approval.

Summary of GAO's grants streamlining report

As I posted earlier, GAO has released its second grants streamlining report. They surveyed grantees for this one, and found that many of the goals of P.L. 106-107 have not yet been met. (Hands up -- who's surprised?  I thought so...) Here's a summary of the main points of the report.

• Lack of standardization across agencies and grant administration inefficiencies
  • Continued proliferation of different application, reporting, and payment systems
  • Nomencalture differences across government
  • Agency grant processes do not align with typical grantee business processes
• Grants.gov implementation difficulties (particularly the lack of a non-PC client, its search capabilities, and the registration process)
• Inadequate progress across all streamlining initiatives (Grants.gov, GMLOB, workgroups)
• Continued lack of communication about grants streamlining between government and grantees
• GAO recommends that P.L. 106-107 be reauthorized beyond its November 2007 sunset date
• Desire for more definition about the scope and timeline for streamlining initiatives
• Desire for an end-to-end online grants management system that grantees can use to manage their grants across multiple agencies

I think it's important to highlight what's being done to address some of these issues.

1. The P.L. 106-107 workgroups are aligning terminology and policy language.
2. They're also standardizing grant reports across agencies (but they haven't been implemented yet).
3. Grants.gov is optimizing its registration process, in as much as it can, and is seeking out new systems integration services to create a platform for improved 'front office' functionality.
4. The Grants Policy Committee is holding an "open webcast" in September to invite grantee comment on their work.

So there's definitely activity around these issues. In my view, what's needed is a renewed (and well-funded) focus on them, as a coherent whole.

Usefully, the paper includes appendices that detail the issues identified by grantees, and the actions that some states have taken to streamline their grant administration activities.

The recommendation for Congress to reauthorize P.L. 106-107 is good to see, and I hope that Congress takes it up. But this is only half the battle. The goals of P.L. 106-107 have not been met largely because so little funding was given over to its implementation. If Congress does indeed reauthorize the law they should also allocate hard cash to ensure it is run as a coherent project. If this happens, I think we'd see harder timelines and scope being generated by each of the program's projects (the workgroups, GMLOB, and Grants.gov included).

This report does a great job of summarizing the grants streamlining landscape from a grantee's perspective, based on interviews and hard data drawn from a number of reasonably reliable sources. As our NGP report from last year noted, there's still a lot of work to do in grants streamlining. My hope is that the projects, conversations, and discussions that are ongoing will only accelerate, and avoid paralysis caused by Congressional inaction on P.L. 106-107.

New GAO grants streamlining report

GAO just released its second report on grants streamlining. I'm digesting it this afternoon and will report back with a briefing later on. For now, here's the link:

Grants Management: Grantees' Concerns with Efforts to Streamline and Simplify Processes. GAO-06-566, July 28
http://www.gao.gov/cgi-bin/getrpt?GAO-06-566
Highlights - http://www.gao.gov/highlights/d06566high.pdf

A nice reminder

I went to a meeting today with some folks I'd never met before and we got to talking about the use of open source. They are in a government agency and are extremely enthusiastic about using as much OSS as possible. And then they asked me, "Why aren't you at OSCON?"

The answer is, I can't afford it. But regardless of that, I was delighted to be reminded that there are great people doing hard work in government who are promoting the use of open source every day. The fact of it is, the government buys a lot of technology (I couldn't name a single agency that doesn't have an Oracle Enterprise license, for example) and those purchases and products get a lot of publicity as a result.

Underneath the covers, though, agencies are using open source everywhere. (And I'm happy to say that we're integrating a lot of it.) I believe that Tomcat, Perl, Plone, and a slew of other OSS technologies are the ones that truly rule the roost in government because, like any large organization that wants to get stuff done, buying software is expensive and takes a lot of time.

I just appreciated being reminded of this today because for the past few weeks my head's been filled with license costs and feature descriptions of commercial products we've been bidding on very large proposals. It was nice to remember that underpinning all of this is OSS, and it's alive and well in government.

S.2590 - Hearings and a 'Doh!' moment

Word reaches me that two NGP Partners testified at the latest hearings regarding S.2590, otherwise known as the "Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act", which was amusingly titled What You Don't Know Can Hurt You. Hoho!

And somewhat related is the reminder contained in the background materials about the FAT bill on Senator Coburn's web site:

The website required by this bill would not be difficult to develop. In fact, one such site already exists for some federal funds provided by agencies within the Department of Health and Human Services. The CRISP (Computer Retrieval of Information on Scientific Projects) is a searchable database of federally funded biomedical research projects conducted at universities, hospitals, and other research institutions.

Doh! Not only is this something I should have remembered, I'm further shamed because our company worked on CRISP a while ago! (Yes, we're to blame for the icons and whatnot, even. Hey, if it were down to me, we'd have changed them all a long time ago,) Mea culpa. Or, perhaps, mea dolt?

Anyway, I'm not sure I agree that CRISP's existence indicates that satisfying S.2590 would "not be difficult". It was hard enough to get NIH to consolidate award data in one place, never mind the whole government!

Congress stymies e-gov progress. Again.

For the last four years, Congress has put funding for e-government projects under increasing pressure. Jason Miller of GCN has the latest scoop on this year's attempts by Congress to determine the precise benefits of e-government initiatives, such as Grants.gov and E-Authentication, and OMB's attempt to provide the data to support continued investment in them. Some quotes regarding Grants.gov are most illustrative of the real issue at hand:

'[A] House staff member pointed to Grants.gov and E-Payroll as two projects that appear to be redundant to other, pre-existing systems.

“The committee provided money for the Federal Transit Administration to develop a grants management site. It works well for them, so why should they get dinged for money for Grants.gov?” the staff member said.'

And from a follow-up article, regarding the delay in Congress's approval of e-government funding in certain agencies' budgets:

'Even with the quicker turnaround, nearly every e-government project, including E-Rulemaking, Grants.gov and the Integrated Acquisition Environment, felt some impact from the delay.

Some projects put off upgrades, while others had to do fewer outreach activities, federal officials said.

And the delays are becoming more commonplace as project managers now plan for funding lethargy.

“Grants.gov’s program management office has program management controls in place to ensure that the initiative can stay operational and within budget,” said Terry Nicolosi, Grants.gov deputy program manager. “Any potential and actual funding shortfall that impacts the initiative is analyzed, and an alleviation plan is constructed and communicated to [the Office of Management and Budget] and our governance board that is made up of the 26 federal grant-making agencies before being incorporated into our operating plan.”'

Grants.gov is duplicative of some pre-existing systems. However, that's the point: the government should build one, consolidated way of doing things and then ensure all agencies follow that path. Everyone knows that it's frustrating, and annoying, and creates more work and a duplicative investment, but only in the relative short-term. If there's one place to find and apply for grants (and, ultimately, to review, award, report on, and close out grants), then the rest of the government doesn't need to build exactly the same thing over again and spend taxpayer money twice. Congress's inability to stay focused on the goals ensures that the "relative short-term" is relative only to the amount of debate necessary to come to blindingly obvious conclusions, e.g. quite a lot.

The issue here is not the systems, or the benefits of those systems. It's Congress's paranoia that the Executive branch, through OMB, is trying to wrestle control of agency budgets away from the Legislative branch. (Which, if you think about it, is a lot like saying that a company's board of directors doesn't want its management team to optimize its business.)

This spat has little to do with real-world, citizen-focused or mission-focused benefits of e-government but everything to do with control of power and money.

As Grants.gov and other e-gov initiatives move towards fee-for-service models, this argument will become redundant, more acute, or just plain silly (or perhaps some entertaining combination of all three?). Stay tuned.

New contracts for government services?

GovExec reported yesterday on a recommendation that GSA create a new type of contract for services acquisitions, arguing that existing contracts are geared more towards buying goods. This will create a whole lot of change in government IT contracting, if it goes ahead, so I have to wonder what problem it aims to solve. Is there not enough competition for government IT contracts right now? Is the government not getting value for money? Or is the procurement process too slow? Or is it something else entirely? Before proposing a recommendation, I think the data needs to be examined to understand the problem we're aiming to solve.

Some of the other recommendations seem to make a lot of sense:

• GSA should conduct market research on a continual basis
• At least three bids should be required for every procurement exceeding $100,000
• Task order purchases and sole source acquisitions valued above $100,000 should be posted to FedBizOpps
• Protest opportunities should be extended to task and delivery orders above $5 million

I'm particularly in favor of the idea of having more transparency about task orders. Ever tried to get good, deep data on a government-wide acquisition contract? Every single one has a different method of providing that information, if they provide it at all. Unless you have access to FedSources, INPUT, or a similar tool, you're basically committed to a long time searching for the information.

Implementing a federal funds awards database

I neglected to follow up my post about S.2590 so I'm going to fix that now. The big question about this and H.R.5060, which both propose the establishment of an online database of federal funding awards, is how such a database can be implemented.

The first challenge is the data. Agencies all report their awards data in different ways right now. Some notify Congress, some don't. Some roll up their awards data into a single data submission to FAADS or FPDS, and some don't. The formats in which this data is assembled and sent out are also different across agencies. So the first challenge is to figure out how to standardize awards data across all agencies.

Grants Policy Committee Open Stakeholders Webcast

Bizarre title for a meeting, I agree, but welcome all the same because it means that the Grants Policy Committee has organized itself to hold an open forum meeting to which all-comers are welcome. Holding open, come-as-ye-are grants policies meetings has been a long-sought objective of a number of groups, including the National Grants Partnership which published a white paper last year that included a recommendation on this topic, and the GAO. The date has been set for September 27, 2006, from 11.00am to 1.30pm. Webcast details will be confirmed later, I assume!