The federal grant life cycle spans multiple stages, from congressional appropriation through agency administration, award management, and final closeout. It explains how federal agencies manage funding opportunities, application reviews, and post-award monitoring.
Key Insights
- The federal grant life cycle begins with congressional appropriation and proceeds with agencies publishing Notices of Funding Opportunities (NOFOs) on platforms like Grants.gov and SAM.gov.
- Federal agencies evaluate submitted applications through a merit review process to determine qualified recipients before making award decisions.
- Grants enter a post-award phase involving performance monitoring and conclude with closeout, after which funding may be closed, renewed, or continued, restarting the cycle.
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All right, let's review the federal grant life cycle. It starts off with a congressional appropriation. Congress has already green-lighted through its authorization legislation.
But once Congress has appropriated funding to the grant, federal agencies can issue and publish what we call a Notice of Funding Opportunities. And these are published in a couple of places. Federal agencies are required to publish the full Notice of Funding Opportunity via Grants.gov. However, you may find truncated or summarized NOFOs via SAM.gov. Additionally, on the federal agency's website, you should also be able to find the full Notice of Opportunity.
After that is published, federal agencies receive grant applications, and they go through, whether it's discretionary funds or mandatory funds, a merit review process to ensure the recipients of the funds are adequate federal stewards of the federal funding. After that, approvals for awards or subawards are made. And we go from the pre-award phase to the post-award phase.
And this is where monitoring begins. We monitor the grant during its period of performance. At the end of the period of performance, we call that phase the closeout phase.
And either the grant is officially closed out, it's recycled, renewed, or continued. And the cycle starts over again, once again, having to begin with congressional appropriations legislation.