A Simpler Grants Experience: Time to Deliver for Grantees and Taxpayers

Each year, the federal government awards more than $1 trillion in grants to fund critical national priorities such as rural development projects, community health centers, affordable housing developments, and school nutrition programs. This is an extraordinary national commitment to communities across the country. But too often, the money gets stuck behind a tangle of outdated systems, confusing portals, and endless paperwork. The result? Dollars invested don’t always become dollars delivered.

According to a recent conversation with federal grant executives, the federal government uses over 100 separate grants management systems, each with its own logins, forms, application requirements, reporting formats, and data standards. This leaves applicants—whether state agencies, local governments, or small nonprofits—wading through multiple websites, conflicting instructions, and incompatible logins just to access funding they may desperately need. Moreover, these systems also present a strain on the government’s resources. Each system requires its own maintenance support and specialized administrators, increasing costs to the government, siphoning funds from grant recipients and taxpayers alike.

The human cost of fragmented and outdated grant systems is real: A state trying to expand mental health services in small rural communities through grants burns through limited staff time navigating lengthy and non-intuitive reporting interfaces from outdated legacy systems instead of treating patients. These aren’t abstract inefficiencies—they’re real barriers keeping funding from reaching people who need it most.

The recent Improving Our Nation Through Better Design Executive Order might offer some hope. The EO acknowledges “there is a high financial cost to maintaining legacy systems, to say nothing of the cost in time lost by the American public trying to navigate them.” Experience isn’t a luxury—it’s essential infrastructure. Just as highways and bridges connect communities, digital systems connect dollars to impact. When those systems are fragmented and outdated, the whole promise of government investment breaks down.

To fix these inefficiencies we need a single, streamlined, user-friendly grants experience – one platform where grantees can discover opportunities, apply for funding, manage awards, and report on performance. Designed well, such a system wouldn’t weaken compliance; it would make compliance a natural byproduct of the process, not the driving purpose. This isn’t science fiction. The technology exists, and promising pilots are already showing what’s possible.

Modernizing the grants experience shouldn’t just be about technology – it should be about impact. Right now, the system enforces compliance for compliance’s sake, generating documentation that often has little connection to real results. America needs a grants system that focuses on outcomes we can all see — care delivered, bridges built, meals served, children taught, and families supported.

Enabling all agencies to provide a modern grants experience would deliver enormous benefits. Grantees would save time by entering data once instead of multiple times across multiple systems—time they could spend actually delivering services. Federal agencies could process applications faster and dedicate more resources to program evaluation and performance improvement. Taxpayers could rest assured that their tax dollars are reaching the people and places most in need.

Standardizing grant systems would also dramatically reduce waste, fraud, and abuse. In today’s patchwork of siloed platforms, data is difficult to share across programs and red flags are easy to miss. Unified, transparent systems allow for better analytics, earlier interventions, and more proactive prevention and management. The Department of Health and Human Service’s Grants Quality Service Management Office (HHS QSMO) improved the grants system landscape by creating standards for basic grant system functionality. But the next evolution of this standardization for federal systems is to create standards for system performance and customer experience, ensuring our systems are user friendly, cost effective, and efficient.

Federal grants represent a covenant between government and the public—a promise to solve problems and support communities. But that promise is undermined when the grandmother in Montana can’t get broadband because the application process is too complex, when the rural hospital spends more time on paperwork than patient care, when the unsafe bridge remains unfixed because navigating federal application processes requires expertise most communities lack.

We don’t need to wait for a breakthrough. We need leadership, commitment, and to stop asking every agency to reinvent the wheel while communities wait for help that’s already been funded. It’s time to deliver a simpler grants experience—not just for agencies, but for every person whose life could be improved by the programs our tax dollars are meant to support.