Fully Implementing the Grants Management Line of Business across Government

Federal grant-making agencies awarded approximately $496 billion in grants during fiscal year 2007. Managing these grants involves many systems, each needing to be maintained and updated at significant cost. Further, these grants management processes and systems hamper streamlining and standardizing procedures across agencies, thus adding to grantees' administrative burden. In fiscal year 2004, a task force of representatives from the grant-making agencies developed a target model for the grants management line of business and agreed on how to implement it. It would involve three consortia, with members sharing a common system. They estimated that through fiscal year 2015, $1.5 billion would be saved from reducing federal expenditures for equipment, operations, and maintenance costs of agency-specific systems. In 2005, GAO recommended that the Director of the Office of Management and Budget ensure that efforts to develop common grant-reporting systems, such as through this initiative, are undertaken on a timely schedule. Some progress has been made; for example, agencies have been selected to lead consortia. However, the Office of Management and Budget will need to urge the remaining agencies to migrate to those systems to benefit from the consolidation themselves, enable grantees to interact with fewer different systems, and reduce the total cost of managing federal grants.

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Grants Management: Additional Actions Needed to Streamline and Simplify Processes

GAO-05-335, April 18, 2005

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