Grants update: Dollars left adrift?

Money going nowhere, federal firings and resignations, and grants listings and updates for the week.

Welcome to the first fully-paywalled edition of THE MONEY. There are slight format changes for readability. I always appreciate your thoughts: nick@jobsthat.work.

Toplines on this week’s listings

• Posited: money isn’t real. First, this week’s total is about $2 billion, but I think it’s safe to say that these listings are all awaiting the congressional cuts that are ambling toward reconciliation.

  • We have more disappearing documents on federal funding opportunities, to the point I am now marking it in the listings below. These funding opportunities all appear to be open, and in many cases, the applicable documents are on agency-specific sites.

  • I have now marked all opportunities with disappearing documents as VERY HIGH on Danger Ratings. I don’t want to assign any kind of Administration strategy here because I don’t think there is one, but be mindful of the budget battle.

• State listings are here. These will start as a trickle and not a flood, and I am trying to avoid funding opportunities where I don’t think you have enough time to put together a competitive application at this stage.

  • The holdup here has been sourcing—some states have very defined opportunities, others just want to hang out and maybe give you a grant to train pre-apprentices. I am leaning toward giving you the former only now to avoid pointing you toward, say, a rolling state opportunity for a program that exhausted its budget for the year but hasn’t posted that online.

• This week in $450-million-worth of PDF-related port grant drama. As I discussed last week, a key bit of port infrastructure funding allegedly is getting a new funding opportunity notice, but the same Biden notice is on grants.gov. Again, the question here is if the Administration waiting for Congress to do the job for them, but that assumes a level of planning I’m not hearing or seeing in the fine details here.

Situational awareness

• Downshifting on optimism. The budget framework narrowly escaped the House, and it sounds like plenty of big changes are on the horizon.

  • Reconciliation has its limitations, but the workers we serve and how we serve them through workforce programs could significantly change in the coming months. And probably not for the better.

  • And even if it doesn’t, well, the Administration is doing everything it can to get rid of the staff needed to serve people effectively. More in the section below on the Department of Labor cuts.

• Shutdown watch. Democrats are demanding language in the budget that tells the Administration to spend the money Congress appropriated to it—also known as “How American government works.” Republicans have balked.

• The freeze is unfrozen, kinda. A federal court enjoined any attempts by the Administration to continue the funding freeze in any form. I think that will do something, but strangely, money still isn’t getting spent in some places.

• It turns out you have to define something to ban it. Another judge enjoined the ban on “DEIA,” a term not defined in the Executive Order used by the Administration as a reason to slash existing projects. The vagueness played a role.

• Tweeting projects to death. In a sign I am probably not well, I have been closely monitoring the Education Department’s press office page. This week they cut $226 million of projects based on tweets by conservative education activist Chris Rufo, linking to his tweets in a government press release.

  • Look, I don’t practice grants law anymore, but um, hope you did those terminations by the book there, homies!

Behind the pay wall

• DOL firing and personnel changes and other things I’m keeping an eye on this week.

• A worst-case scenario for one set of workforce applicants?

• This week’s listings.