191 IT Systems, Zero Coordination: The Bipartisan Bill That Could Finally Fix Federal Grantmaking

A small-town transportation director in Ohio applied for five federal grants in thirty years. Not because the town didn't need funding — it did. Because, as he put it, "it wasn't worth it. It's just so hard to go after it." His experience isn't unusual. It's the norm for thousands of communities that technically qualify for billions in federal assistance but lack the administrative machinery to access it.

The federal government distributes over $1.2 trillion annually through more than 1,900 grant programs administered by over 50 agencies. Each program has its own application process, its own reporting requirements, and its own technology platform. Federal agencies collectively operate 191 different grant management IT systems. Applicants routinely enter the same organizational information — EIN, DUNS number, budget data, organizational capacity — into dozens of separate portals. A single organization applying to three agencies for related community development work might submit the same data through three different systems, in three different formats, with three different compliance frameworks.

The Streamlining Federal Grants Act, reintroduced in January 2026 with bipartisan sponsors in both chambers, proposes to fix this. The bill won't solve every problem with federal grantmaking, but it targets the structural dysfunction that makes the system hardest on the communities that need it most.

What the Bill Actually Does

The legislation, introduced by Senators Gary Peters (D-MI) and James Lankford (R-OK) in the Senate and Representatives Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-WA) and Virginia Foxx (R-NC) in the House, mandates five specific reforms.

A government-wide Grants Council. Under OMB oversight, the Council would coordinate standardized Notices of Funding Opportunity, implement common data standards across agencies, improve interagency data sharing, and support federal grant workforce development. Each grant-making agency would designate a Senior Agency Official to sit on the Council and lead streamlining efforts within their agency. These aren't new hires — the bill explicitly designates existing employees, avoiding the political objection of expanding the bureaucracy to fix the bureaucracy.

Plain-language funding notices. Every NOFO would be required to include a concise summary written in plain language, along with information about application assistance, training resources, and reporting requirements. This sounds minor until you've read a 47-page NOFO from HRSA that buries eligibility criteria in subsection 4.1.2.3(b) of an appendix. The Government Accountability Office has found that smaller localities "may not even know what's out there or where to find federal grants, or how to apply." Plain-language requirements attack that problem at the source.

Standardized application processes. Agencies would be required to coordinate their application requirements through OMB, reducing the duplication that forces applicants to reformat the same information for different systems. The bill doesn't mandate a single universal application — that would be impractical given the diversity of federal programs — but it requires agencies to identify common elements and standardize them.

Grants.gov modernization. The bill directs the HHS Secretary and OMB Director to study and enhance the Grants.gov platform. Anyone who has used Grants.gov knows the problem: a search for "watermelon grants" once returned an unrelated Egyptian education program. The platform's search infrastructure, user interface, and data architecture haven't kept pace with the volume and complexity of federal funding opportunities it's supposed to help people find.

GAO evaluations. The Government Accountability Office would be required to evaluate barriers that underserved communities face in accessing federal grants and assess whether the reforms are working. This accountability mechanism matters because previous grant modernization efforts have stalled in implementation. Congressional mandates without evaluation mechanisms become unfunded suggestions.

Why 191 Systems Is the Core Problem

The fragmentation of federal grant management isn't an accident. It's the accumulated result of decades of individual agencies building custom solutions for their specific programs. The Department of Education's grant management system doesn't talk to the Department of Health and Human Services' system, which doesn't talk to USDA's, which doesn't talk to the Department of Labor's. Each system represents a logical decision made in isolation that becomes irrational at scale.

For large research universities and national nonprofits with dedicated grants offices, this fragmentation is a cost of doing business. They employ specialists who know the quirks of each agency's system, maintain templates for each format, and build compliance calendars across multiple reporting timelines. The overhead is significant but manageable.

For a rural county government with three full-time employees, a tribal nation with a single grants coordinator, or a small nonprofit operating an after-school program, the same fragmentation is a barrier to entry. The GAO has documented this repeatedly: communities that receive grants from multiple agencies face "greater administrative and planning burdens" than those working with a single agency. But the communities with the most complex needs — economic development, housing, workforce training, health services — are precisely the ones that need to access programs from multiple agencies.

The result is a system that distributes federal dollars disproportionately to organizations with existing grant management capacity. A 2023 GAO report found that smaller communities consistently underutilize available federal grant programs, not because they don't qualify but because the application burden exceeds their administrative capacity. One broadband grant required invoices spanning hundreds of pages. Sub-recipient monitoring and federal compliance activities "often require hiring expensive consultants" — costs that small organizations can't absorb and that the grants themselves don't always cover.

The Political Calculus

The Streamlining Federal Grants Act has an unusual political profile: it's genuinely bipartisan and genuinely unexciting. That combination is its greatest strength and its greatest vulnerability.

Senator Lankford, a conservative Republican, frames the bill as cutting government waste and red tape: "The huge federal bureaucratic maze continues to make the grant process difficult to navigate." Senator Peters, a Democrat, frames it as equity and access: "Complicated application processes cause smaller, more rural, and under-resourced communities to miss out on critical opportunities." Representative Foxx, the Republican chair of the House Education and Workforce Committee, emphasizes interagency coordination and data sharing. Representative Gluesenkamp Perez, a Democrat from rural Washington state, focuses on the practical impact on communities like the ones she represents.

They're all describing the same problem from different angles, which is why the bill has attracted endorsements from an unusual coalition: the National League of Cities, the National Council of Nonprofits, the National Association of Counties, fire departments in rural Michigan, community colleges, and municipal leagues. The breadth of support reflects the universality of the problem — every organization that applies for federal grants has stories about duplicative paperwork, incompatible systems, and opaque processes.

The vulnerability is salience. Grant management reform doesn't generate headlines. It doesn't create constituencies that march on Washington. In a legislative environment dominated by budget fights, education funding disruptions, and agency restructuring, process reform bills compete for floor time against existential crises. The bill passed the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee in a previous session but never reached a full floor vote. Whether this session is different depends on whether leadership views grantmaking reform as a complement to — rather than a distraction from — the larger fiscal debates.

What It Doesn't Fix

The Streamlining Federal Grants Act is process reform, not structural reform. It doesn't change which programs exist, how much they're funded, or who's eligible. It doesn't address the matching fund requirements that exclude cash-strapped communities from some of the largest federal programs. It doesn't solve the problem of agencies delaying grant competitions or restructuring programs mid-cycle — the kind of executive-branch discretion that has disrupted education, research, and community development funding throughout the past year.

It also doesn't address the federal grant workforce itself. The roughly 28,000 federal employees who administer grants face their own capacity constraints. Training is inconsistent across agencies, technology tools are often outdated, and the expertise needed to manage complex multi-year awards is in short supply. The bill creates a Senior Official position and a Grants Council, but the effectiveness of these structures depends on agencies actually investing in the staff and systems that make coordination possible.

And it doesn't fix the fundamental tension between standardization and program specificity. An NIH R01 research grant and a USDA Rural Business Development Grant have genuinely different requirements because they fund genuinely different activities. The challenge is identifying which requirements are program-specific necessities and which are legacy artifacts of agency-specific systems. The bill's mandate to OMB to coordinate standardization gives the executive branch broad discretion in drawing that line — discretion that could produce meaningful simplification or cosmetic changes, depending on implementation.

What Grant Seekers Should Do Now

Track the bill's progress. The Streamlining Federal Grants Act (S. 3709 in the Senate) has bipartisan momentum but hasn't passed either chamber. If it does, implementation timelines will matter — the Grants Council and standardization mandates would roll out over multiple fiscal years, not overnight.

Submit public comments. If the bill generates a request for public input during committee markup, organizations that have experienced the fragmentation problem firsthand should contribute. Specific examples — "we submitted the same budget narrative to four agencies in four formats in FY2025" — are more persuasive than general complaints about bureaucracy.

Invest in grants infrastructure now. Whether or not Congress passes this bill, the trend toward common data standards and digital grant management is accelerating. Organizations that invest in systematic grants management — consistent budget formats, reusable narrative templates, compliance tracking systems — will benefit regardless of the federal landscape. Tools like Granted can help smaller organizations build this infrastructure without dedicated grants staff.

Build relationships with your Senior Agency Official. If the bill passes, each grant-making agency will designate a Senior Official responsible for streamlining. These officials will have significant influence over how standardization is implemented within their agencies. Organizations with existing relationships at their primary funding agencies should track these appointments and engage early.

Don't wait for perfect to apply. The current system is dysfunctional, but it's also the system that distributes $1.2 trillion annually. Communities that delay applying because the process is frustrating are leaving money on the table. The Streamlining Federal Grants Act would make the process easier — but the grants are available now, and the communities that need them can't wait for Congress to fix the plumbing.

The Deeper Question

The Streamlining Federal Grants Act addresses a real problem with pragmatic solutions. But it also raises a question that grant policy rarely confronts directly: who is the federal grant system designed to serve?

If the answer is "organizations with the capacity to navigate it," then the current system works as intended — badly for small communities, acceptably for large institutions. If the answer is "the communities with the greatest need," then process reform is a necessary first step, but only a first step. The Streamlining Federal Grants Act won't transform a system built on institutional capacity into one built on community need. What it can do is lower the barrier enough that a few more communities make it through the door — and that, for the transportation director in Ohio who gave up after five applications in thirty years, would be worth the effort.