Grants update: Everything is on fire.

The money that's out there (kind of), the money that's not (kind of), and what you can do now about both.

Stuff you should know about grants this week, in brief.

This week’s listings

• In terms of sheer total, there are nearly $1.5 billion in open funding opportunities with workforce ties in this newsletter. Much of that comes from two layer-cake¹ FEMA funding opportunities that are hyperqualified with caps, matches, and limitations. And which may not be awarded. Good times.
  

• If your organization is in Appalachia and helps people with substance-use disorder get back to work, drop in a pre-application TODAY for Appalachian Regional Commission’s INSPIRE grant. More details below, but the pre-application is very short and straightforward. Fuller application next month.
  

• I’m doing shorter listings of some “workforce-adjacent” funding opportunities to track pullback on workforce priorities. These are Biden projects, and I expect them to shift in some way prior to award. That said, there has been interesting movement on one batch of these dollars, which I note below.
  

• My danger ratings for applicants are back for this edition, with a general upshift in danger on Department of Labor funding based on what I’m seeing out of DOGE.

Situational awareness

• House budget markup was Thursday morning after the release of a blueprint the day before. Healthcare cuts are deservedly eating the oxygen, but the reconciliation instruction directs $330 billion in cuts to education and workforce over the next 10 years. Even if you assume most cuts are at Education, it’s hard to imagine one or two big workforce programs not taking a direct (or complete) hit. Which ones? It’s difficult to say now that Virginia Foxx has moved to the rules committee. Where the blueprint addresses workforce, it is around entitlement changes to increase workforce participation. In other words, to help Americans “help themselves,” as described by Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington, a Texas Republican, at markup Thursday morning.
  

• Bloomberg reports that Henry Mack III, a former Florida education chancellor, will be nominated to head the Employment and Training Administration, DOL’s biggest grantmaking agency. In the last two administrations, it took the better part of the term for the Senate to confirm ETA nominees—will that trend hold? I don’t know much about Mack other than what I quickly found online: he is a three-time Catholic University graduate, his Twitter profile says he is “[b]orn to philosophize, forced to work,” and he seems skeptical about the Education Department’s size based on materials from Cato Institute.
  

• DOGE efforts at DOL have been relatively quiet as Education dollars got shredded. I’m keeping an ear out. My Signal is Nickbeadle.06 if you want to share info discretely.
  

• The Department of Justice’s Office of Violence Against Women told applicants not to finalize applications. I have not heard or seen the same for open grant opportunities in workforce. Stay tuned.
  

• Here is a really fascinating read on the funding changes at the Department of Transportation. I don’t share the same optimism as the author that there will be federal money out there so long as you shift your proposal the right way. That said, this provides a very practical framework for converting Biden DOT priorities to Trump DOT priorities.