ACF Put $224 Million Into Preschool Data Systems for One Year Only — and Locked Out the 11 Jurisdictions With the Best Plans for Spending It

The Preschool Development Grant Birth through Five program has, for most of its existence, funded thinking. States received one-year planning grants to run comprehensive birth-through-five needs assessments and build strategic plans, then competed for three-year renewal grants to implement them.

HHS-2026-ACF-ECD-TP-0039 inverts that. The new PDG B-5 SMART Grant — Strategic Measurement, Analytics, and Results using Technology — explicitly declines to fund planning. ACF's announcement states that investments "should build on existing state planning and data-informed priorities as opposed to funding new strategic planning."

What it funds instead is infrastructure: data systems, dashboards, interoperability, reporting tools, and analytics for statewide early care and education. The notice was posted September 21, 2026, closes November 20, 2026 at 11:59 p.m. EST, and puts $224,000,000 behind roughly 25 awards ranging from a $500,000 floor to a $15,000,000 ceiling.

The period of performance is one year.

The number that reframes this program

PDG B-5 has never moved money at this rate per jurisdiction.

The 2024 Renewal Grant round awarded approximately $87 million across 11 grantees — New York, Kansas, South Carolina, North Carolina, Rhode Island, Virginia, Washington, Michigan, Minnesota, Tennessee, and the District of Columbia — on three-year terms. That is roughly $7.9 million per grantee across three years, or about $2.6 million per grantee per year.

The SMART round offers $224 million across 25 expected awards. That is an average of roughly $9 million per award, for twelve months of performance.

On a per-grantee-per-year basis, PDG B-5 SMART moves roughly 3.4 times the money of the 2024 Renewal round — and it does so for a single, narrow purpose category rather than broad systems implementation. A state at the $15 million ceiling is receiving, in one year, nearly twice what a 2024 renewal grantee received across three.

That concentration is the whole story of this NOFO, and it produces both the opportunity and the risk.

The eligibility exclusion is the most consequential line in the notice

All states and territories may apply except the 10 states and the District of Columbia currently completing the third year of their 2024 PDG B-5 Renewal Grants.

Read what that means. The 11 jurisdictions that just spent three years building implementation capacity on top of a federally funded needs assessment and strategic plan — the jurisdictions with the most mature, most recently validated, most federally scrutinized early-childhood system plans in the country — are the ones that cannot compete for the money designed to operationalize such plans.

For the roughly 46 remaining eligible jurisdictions, this is an unusually favorable field. Fifty states, the District of Columbia, and the territories give approximately 57 potential applicants; subtract the 11 excluded and 25 expected awards against roughly 46 eligible jurisdictions implies a success rate above 50%. Federal discretionary competitions almost never look like this.

For the 11 excluded jurisdictions, the practical move is to begin documenting now what a SMART-equivalent investment would have accomplished, because a program structured this way is unlikely to be a one-time event and the exclusion is tied to a grant period that ends.

Two options, and picking wrong is the common failure mode

ACF structured the competition around two distinct investment paths.

Option 1 — Technology Infrastructure. For states that need to strengthen data systems, dashboards, interoperability, and reporting tools in order to address an identified priority. This is the build path.

Option 2 — Innovation Testing. For states that already have strong systems and are ready to test a specific strategy, using existing data infrastructure to track outcomes. This is the deploy-and-measure path.

The distinction is not cosmetic. Option 2 presumes working infrastructure and will be read against whether you can actually instrument an outcome within twelve months. Option 1 presumes you cannot yet and will be read against whether the build is feasible in twelve months.

States habitually overestimate which category they are in. An agency with a child care licensing database, a separate Head Start data feed, a pre-K enrollment system, and no interoperability between them is an Option 1 applicant, regardless of how sophisticated any individual system is. Claiming Option 2 on that footing invites a reviewer to conclude the applicant does not understand its own architecture — which is a fatal finding in a competition about data maturity.

The twelve-month clock is the binding constraint, not the budget

ACF intends to make awards before the end of the calendar year. Pair that with a one-year period of performance and the operating window runs roughly from late December 2026 to late December 2027.

Now consider how state government buys software.

Competitive IT procurement at the state level routinely consumes six to nine months from requirements through RFP, evaluation, protest window, contract negotiation, and legal review. A twelve-month award that must procure a new platform through a standard competitive solicitation can plausibly have three months of actual implementation left by the time a vendor is under contract.

This is the arithmetic that will separate successful SMART projects from expensive disappointments, and it points at a specific set of winning strategies:

Build on an existing contract vehicle. A task order against an in-place master agreement, a cooperative purchasing schedule, or an existing vendor relationship removes the largest single schedule risk in the project. Say so in the narrative — explicitly, with the vehicle named.

Scope to a phase, not a system. ACF asks for "focused, feasible investments yielding measurable results within the project period." A proposal to integrate four data systems in twelve months reads as implausible. A proposal to stand up a validated interoperability layer between two named systems, with a family-facing dashboard on top, reads as deliverable.

Front-load the measurement design. If results must be measurable inside the period, the baseline has to be captured in the first weeks, not discovered in month ten. A proposal that specifies its baseline measurement in the first quarter is signaling that the applicant has actually planned the year.

The match and the Governor's office

Cost sharing is required — applicants must provide state matching funds. Two implications follow.

First, a state match on a $9 million average award is not a rounding error in an early-childhood agency budget, and in most states it requires either an existing appropriation or an identified in-kind contribution. The match must be real and documentable at submission. Seven weeks is enough time to secure a letter from a budget office; it is not enough time to pass an appropriation.

Second, and more interesting: applicants receive bonus points for Governor's office coordination. PDG B-5 has always been a governor-centric program — the authorizing framework routes it through state executive leadership precisely because early care and education is split across education, health, human services, and licensing agencies that do not otherwise coordinate.

In a competition this favorable on raw odds, the bonus points are where the field actually separates. A letter of support from a Governor's office is table stakes. A narrative that demonstrates the Governor's office convened the agencies, arbitrated data-sharing authority between them, and will own the governance structure after the award period — that is the differentiator, and it is the thing a single agency acting alone cannot manufacture.

Sustainability is the unasked question you must answer anyway

A one-year technology award creates an obvious cliff. Data platforms incur hosting, licensing, and staffing costs in year two that the grant will not cover.

Child Trends, in its guidance for states on this competition, makes the point directly: although the grant supports one year of funding, successful projects should establish foundations for long-term improvement through governance, staffing, data standards, and partnerships. Their broader framework is worth the read — notably the recommendation to identify policy priorities before selecting technology, on the principle that technology should support a state's priorities rather than define them.

That ordering is the single most common failure in public-sector data projects. A state that leads its narrative with a vendor platform and works backward to justify it is describing a procurement. A state that leads with the three policy questions it cannot currently answer — how many eligible children are unserved in which counties, which providers are closing and why, whether a given quality intervention changes outcomes — and then specifies the minimum infrastructure required to answer them, is describing a program.

Reviewers in a competition named Strategic Measurement, Analytics, and Results using Technology will notice which one they are reading.

What this signals beyond one NOFO

Set the strategy aside and look at the shape of the thing. A long-running program that funded planning and multi-year implementation has been reconfigured into a single-year, technology-restricted, measurement-forward competition at roughly triple the historical annual rate per jurisdiction, with awards obligated inside the calendar year.

That is a federal grantmaker optimizing for demonstrable short-horizon output over durable capacity. Whether that produces better early-childhood systems is a genuinely open question — twelve months is a short time to build anything that outlives its grant. But it is unambiguously a change in what ACF is buying, and states that submit a 2024-style systems-building narrative into a 2026 measurement-and-technology competition will find out the hard way.

The deadline is November 20, 2026. For roughly 46 eligible jurisdictions chasing 25 awards, this is one of the most favorable federal competitions of the year. The constraint is not whether you can win it. It is whether you can execute it in twelve months — and your proposal has to prove you have thought about that before the reviewer does.

Sources:

• Grants.gov opportunity listing: PDG B-5 SMART Grant (HHS-2026-ACF-ECD-TP-0039)
• First Five Years Fund: HHS Announces New PDG B-5 SMART Grant Funding Opportunity
• Child Trends: Five Ways for States to Maximize the PDG B-5 SMART Grant
• FFYF: 10 States and DC Receive New Round of PDG B-5 Grants (2024)
• ACF: PDG B-5 State and Territory Map