Federal Agencies Use 191 Different Grant Systems. Congress Wants to Fix That.

Ask anyone who has applied for grants from more than one federal agency and you will hear the same complaint: every agency is its own universe. Different forms, different portals, different reporting requirements, different definitions of the same terms. The federal government distributes roughly $1.2 trillion in grants annually, and it does so through 191 separate grant management IT systems — a fragmentation that costs applicants thousands of hours and costs taxpayers billions in inefficiency.

The Streamlining Federal Grants Act, which cleared the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee with bipartisan support, is the most serious legislative attempt in years to rationalize this sprawl. (Granted News) The bill has companion legislation in the House and endorsements from county governments, nonprofits, universities, and municipalities across the country.

Whether it becomes law depends on floor votes that have not yet been scheduled. But the provisions it contains — plain language requirements, common data standards, a government-wide Grants Council, and mandatory improvements to Grants.gov — signal where federal grants administration is heading regardless of this particular bill's fate.

191 Systems: How Federal Grants Got This Fragmented

The statistic that defines the problem is 191. That is the number of distinct IT systems federal agencies use to manage grants, according to data compiled by the Government Accountability Office. Each system has its own data formats, its own user interfaces, and its own reporting templates.

How did this happen? Federal grants administration evolved agency by agency over decades. HHS built eRA Commons for NIH grants. NSF built Research.gov. DOE built PAMS. EPA built its own system. USDA built another. Each agency designed its technology around its specific program requirements, with minimal coordination across government.

Grants.gov was created in 2002 as a centralized portal for finding and applying to federal grants. It succeeded at the discovery part — most federal funding opportunities are now listed on Grants.gov — but it never became the centralized management platform it was intended to be. Applicants still find opportunities on Grants.gov and then get redirected to agency-specific systems for the actual application, review, award management, and reporting.

The result is a system that structurally advantages large institutions with dedicated grants offices. A major research university employs staff who specialize in NIH submissions, NSF submissions, DOD submissions, and DOE submissions — each requiring different expertise, different software, and different compliance knowledge. A community college, a rural county government, or a small nonprofit cannot afford that kind of specialization.

What the Bill Actually Does

The Streamlining Federal Grants Act contains five major directives, each targeting a different layer of the problem.

1. Designate Senior Agency Officials for Grants. Each federal agency would be required to appoint a senior official responsible for grants management improvement. This sounds bureaucratic, but it addresses a real gap: at most agencies, no single person is accountable for the quality of the grants experience. Responsibility is distributed across program officers, grants management specialists, IT staff, and compliance teams with no central coordination.

2. Create a Government-Wide Grants Council. The bill establishes a Grants Council supervised by the Office of Management and Budget Director. The council would standardize funding opportunity notices across agencies, implement common data standards for grant reporting, improve interagency data sharing, and support grants workforce development. Think of it as a coordinating body that forces agencies to solve problems together that none of them can solve alone.

3. Require Agency Grant Improvement Plans. Each agency would develop and publish a plan for streamlining its grant application processes, providing training and technical assistance to applicants, and adopting shared software standards. The plans would be subject to GAO review, creating an accountability mechanism that current grants management lacks.

4. Improve Grants.gov. The bill directs the HHS Secretary and OMB Director to study and enhance the Grants.gov platform. While the specifics would be determined through the study, the legislative intent is clear: Grants.gov should function as a genuine end-to-end platform, not just a listings page that hands applicants off to 191 different systems.

5. Require GAO Evaluations. The GAO would be directed to identify barriers that prevent underserved communities from accessing federal grants and evaluate how well agencies implement the bill's requirements. This evaluation mandate is significant because it creates a feedback loop: if agencies fail to simplify their processes, the GAO reports will document the failure publicly.

Who Is Behind It — and Why That Matters

The bill's bipartisan sponsor list is unusually broad. In the Senate, it was introduced by Gary Peters (D-MI), James Lankford (R-OK), and John Cornyn (R-TX) — a combination that spans the ideological spectrum. In the House, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-WA) and Virginia Foxx (R-NC) introduced the companion bill. Foxx chairs the House Education and the Workforce Committee; her involvement signals that the bill's principles have traction among senior Republican appropriators who oversee large federal grants programs.

The support coalition is equally telling. The National Association of Counties, the National Council of Nonprofits, the National League of Cities, and Social Current have all endorsed the legislation. Fire departments, community colleges, economic development organizations, and municipal governments have submitted letters of support.

This breadth matters because grants reform legislation typically dies not from opposition but from indifference. Congress has a long history of passing government management reforms when enough stakeholders push — the DATA Act, the GREAT Act, and the Grant Reporting Efficiency and Agreements Transparency Act all passed with bipartisan support when similar coalitions mobilized.

What This Means for Grant Applicants Right Now

Even if the Streamlining Federal Grants Act stalls on the Senate floor, the trends it codifies are already reshaping grants administration. Here is what applicants should watch for:

Plain language NOFOs are coming. OMB has already pushed agencies to simplify Notices of Funding Opportunity through the updated 2 CFR 200 Uniform Guidance. The Streamlining Act would make this mandatory rather than aspirational. Applicants should expect NOFOs to become more readable — but also more standardized, which means that the formatting and terminology preferences that currently vary by agency will converge.

Common data standards will reduce reporting burden. The bill's push for common data standards across agencies addresses one of the most time-consuming aspects of grants management: reporting. Currently, an organization that receives grants from NIH, NSF, and DOE may need to submit essentially the same financial and progress information in three different formats. Standardization would mean reporting once in a common format.

Grants.gov improvements will accelerate. The platform has already undergone significant upgrades — the Simpler.Grants.gov initiative launched in 2024 with a modernized search interface and API. The bill would mandate further improvements, likely including tighter integration with agency-specific systems and better support for first-time applicants.

Technical assistance will expand. The bill's requirement for agency training and assistance programs reflects a growing recognition that the complexity of federal grants excludes precisely the communities that federal funding is supposed to serve. Small rural counties, tribal governments, and community-based nonprofits lack the institutional knowledge to navigate federal applications without help. Several provisions directly target this gap.

The Deeper Problem the Bill Cannot Solve

The Streamlining Federal Grants Act addresses the procedural barriers to federal grants — the forms, the systems, the language, the reporting. These are real problems, and fixing them would meaningfully improve access to federal funding.

But the deeper challenge in federal grants is not procedural. It is structural. The federal government distributes $1.2 trillion in grants through programs that were designed, authorized, and appropriated at different times, for different purposes, by different congressional committees. Each program has its own statute, its own regulations, its own implementing agency, and its own constituency. Standardizing the application forms does not change the fact that each program has fundamentally different eligibility requirements, evaluation criteria, and reporting obligations dictated by law.

This is why the Grants Council provision may be the bill's most consequential element. A permanent, OMB-supervised body with a mandate to coordinate across agencies could, over time, push for the kind of harmonization that individual agencies cannot achieve on their own. The GREAT Act created some of this infrastructure in 2019. The Streamlining Act would strengthen and institutionalize it.

What to Do Now

For organizations that apply to multiple federal agencies, the near-term action items are practical:

Track the bill. S. 3709 has cleared committee and awaits floor action. If it passes the Senate, House companion legislation is already introduced. The provisions could become law within this Congress.

Invest in Grants.gov fluency. The platform is improving rapidly. Organizations that build internal expertise on Simpler.Grants.gov's search tools, saved searches, and subscription features will have an advantage as the platform becomes more central to federal grants administration.

Document your current reporting burden. If common data standards are implemented, agencies will need to map their existing requirements to the new standards. Organizations that have already documented how they report to each agency will be better positioned to advocate for standards that reduce their workload.

Build relationships with your agency grants offices. The bill requires agencies to appoint senior officials for grants improvement and provide technical assistance. Knowing who those officials are and engaging with their improvement processes will give applicants early visibility into changes that affect them.

The federal grants system was not designed to be this complicated. It became this complicated through decades of accretion, agency autonomy, and congressional program creation. The Streamlining Federal Grants Act is Congress acknowledging that the status quo imposes real costs — on applicants, on communities, and on the effectiveness of federal spending. For organizations navigating that complexity today, tools like Granted can help bridge the gap between what the system demands and what applicants can reasonably provide.