Federal grants follow a comprehensive lifecycle that includes pre-award planning, post-award management, and formal closeout procedures. It highlights the key responsibilities of both federal agencies and recipients throughout the grants process to ensure compliance, effectiveness, and accountability.
Key Insights
- Federal agencies begin the grants cycle in the pre-award phase by conducting needs assessments, aligning goals with strategic priorities, and publishing Notices of Funding Opportunity (NOFOs).
- During the post-award phase, recipients implement and manage grant activities, monitor program progress, and may perform internal or external audits throughout the period of performance.
- In the close-out phase, recipients must submit final reports, return any unspent funds, and complete property disposition processes; one-time no-cost extensions of up to 12 months may be granted if needed.
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The Overall Grants Cycle. We start with the first phase, which is the pre-award phase. In this phase, needs assessments are conducted to identify and justify the community need with data collected from the respective industries that the federal agencies serve.
Program planning is conducted by the federal agency to define the goals, activities, timelines, and how to evaluate success. Federal agencies are taking into consideration their strategic goals and objectives, making sure that they are aligned at the top with the federal agency's priorities. And then funding acquisition is done.
Research and applying for grant funding is completed via the publication of the NOFO, Notice of Funding Opportunity. Now, once a recipient either draws down funds or signs and forward back to the federal agency, their notice of the award, we go from the pre-award phase to the post-award phase. In a post-award phase, this is where monitoring of the grant program begins for what we call the period of performance.
During the period of performance, we have the program establishment. We set up infrastructure and select sub-recipients if the main top-tier recipient is allowed to sub-award. Program operations are executed.
We implement activities, manage payments, report, and monitor. And audits are conducted on multiple levels. It can be on the federal level with single program audits.
It can be done by the recipient themselves with internal audits. But after the period of performance, we enter into the close-out phase of the grant. During the close-out phase of the grant, we either close the grant out completely, we renew it, or we continue it.
Any unfunded funds or any funds that were obligated but have not been spent must be returned to the federal agency. If there is a request for an unfunded or no-cost extension, that can be done as well. For up to a 12-month period, we can extend the period of performance, but we can only request this once.
And finally, once the grant finally ends, during close-out, final reports, financial reconciliation, and the results of any deliverables or documents attached to the grant have to be submitted to the federal agency, as well as equipment and property disposition requests from the recipient or the sub-recipient.