The combination of funding contained in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 and fiscal year 2009 and 2010 budget appropriations eventually will provide a special surprise package for public safety and emergency management agencies.
But it will also provide a good measure of chaos — and possibly abuse — as state and local governments try to spend billions of dollars in a short time frame.
After cutting $157 million from the Byrne Justice Assistance Grant (JAG) program for fiscal 2008 appropriations (a 67 percent reduction from the previous year), Congress decided to restore the program’s funding to more than $550 million for fiscal 2009 and moved along appropriations for fiscal 2010 (which started in October) without any cuts.
Then came the Recovery Act — the stimulus. It gives states $2 billion alone in JAG block grants, plus $1 billion from the Community Oriented Policing Services program, and another $1 billion for discretionary and related grants.
The result is that the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) will have had more than $4 billion in grants to award within a 12-month period. This is roughly 20 times what was previously available. The Bureau of Justice Assistance estimates that it will need to process about 7,000 grant applications, about four times more than in 2008.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) won't have as much of an adjustment because it had been getting higher levels of funding than the DOJ before the Recovery Act. The DHS got a comparable amount as the DOJ from the stimulus act — $3.2 billion to hand out on top of the normal fiscal year appropriations.
Understaffed and Overworked
Handling the entire life cycle of grant processing for this funding is a significant challenge for DOJ and DHS staffs. But there’s an even greater level of complexity for the state agency administrators who are involved in distributing both the DOJ and DHS block grant funding. These state offices generally are understaffed and overworked in normal times, and handling this increased workload will stress them all.
Even at the federal level, cracks are beginning to be noticed. In a report issued in June, the DHS Office of Inspector General concluded that: “The department has put a great deal of effort into improving its processes and controls over awarding, managing, and monitoring contract and grant funds, but it still needs to do more. The department should address the risks of a shortage of trained contracting personnel, such as contracting officers, contracting officer technical representatives and project managers, as well as a shortage of trained grants management personnel. The department also needs to continue to improve its oversight of the grants it awards to state and local recipients. Finally the department needs to identify prudent measures to track the Recovery Act funds while simultaneously working to complete its remediation of material weaknesses in its financial management systems and processes.”
It only takes a few minutes browsing on Recovery.gov to see that the money isn’t moving to the distribution levels as anticipated. As of mid-August, the funding available for the DOJ, as reported by the agency recovery sites, showed that just $970,000 of approximately $3.3 million available had been paid out; and of $861,545 from the DHS, only $99,815 had been paid out. Looking across the states and the federal agency programs, those payout figures hover around 10 percent of the available funding.
Federal authorities also recognize that the challenges brought on by distributing so much money so quickly can lead to fraud and abuse. The DOJ’s Antitrust Division has launched an initiative to train government officials and contractors to recognize and report illegal profiteering from stimulus projects.
According to its Inspector General, the Social Security Administration has received reports of fraudulent e-mails that link to what appears to be the agency’s official Web site, instructing individuals to submit personal information to receive their $250 one-time economic recovery payments.
Mistakes Expected
It’s likely that mistakes will be made, but probably many of them will be unintentional as state and local agencies rush to spend this funding. One of the chief deterrents to intentional abuse, in the minds of many proponents, is the requirement to report the expenditures in detail and show the actual outcome related to saving or creating jobs. The reporting requirements are much more complete than any previously attempted grant-management process.
Concerns about possible abuse, as well as the reporting requirements, are slowing the funding distribution; the real workload of handling so many grants also is a factor. So agencies that still have projects in mind aren’t yet out of luck in seeking funding. The state agency administrators for both the DOJ and DHS funding should become your best friend if you are seeking funding or advice on how to do so. As overworked as they are, these staffs have been fully briefed on the possibilities, are endeavoring to apply them in each state and will comply with the reporting requirement. Progress also has been made in using Grants.gov to announce grant programs for multiple agencies, and most individual agencies also have program guidelines and grant program potentials (e.g., www.ojp.usdoj.gov/funding/solicitations.htm and www.homelandsecurityfunding.info).
While funding will continue through the 2010 calendar — including year two of the Recovery Act funding — there will also be new fiscal year funding that continues to support improvements in public safety and emergency management. So this is not just a flash in the pan.
Indications from numerous state agency administrators are that IT projects are likely prospects for Recovery Act funding. In many cases, agencies have had plans to modernize their IT infrastructure that have been on hold during the financial crisis that states in particular have found themselves. The federal funds can permit important infrastructure improvements to move forward, often with money saving and job producing consequences.
