Agencies Carefully Modernize Their Grants Management Systems

For most of its history, the Environmental Protection Agency has largely been considered a regulatory organization. But over the past several years, with the passage of two landmark pieces of funding legislation, the agency suddenly found itself distributing billions of dollars more per year than it ever had.

“That changed everything,” says Dan Coogan, deputy assistant administrator for infrastructure and extramural resources in the EPA’s Office of Mission Support, speaking about the passage of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act.

“We went from awarding $5 billion a year — largely through our drinking-water and clean-water state revolving funds — to getting $100 billion through those two pieces of legislation. That really changed what our needs were for grant management,” he says.

Collectively, agencies give out more than $1 trillion in grants each year. Much of that total goes to states and cities, but agencies also field grant applications from schools, nonprofits, businesses, students and other individuals and organizations. Behind the scenes, robust IT systems support these agencies as they review applications, award grants and monitor use of the funds. As technology evolves — and as new funding laws strain the capacity of existing systems — federal agencies seek to modernize and consolidate their existing solutions, aiming to streamline processes and ensure a positive experience for both applicants and grant reviewers.

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Michael Hettinger, founding principal at the government advisory firm Hettinger Strategy Group, notes that there has been an additional spotlight on waste, fraud and abuse in recent years, providing an incentive for agencies to optimize their grants management systems and processes.

“Every agency has system challenges, data challenges, old versus new,” he says. “In grants management, you often have a combination of legacy homegrown solutions and more modern grants management systems that have come into the marketplace in the past 10 years or so. Agencies spend an awful lot of money on grants, so it's important to manage that process effectively.”

The Next Generation Grants System Is Built to Specific Requirements

To prepare for the increase in grant funding, EPA raced to hire more grant specialists to review applications, as well as developers to implement low-code tools to enable large-scale processing capabilities for the agency’s existing front-end grant systems, Coogan says. Those systems are largely built on top of commercial, off-the-shelf solutions such as Salesforce, Microsoft Power BI and ServiceNow, Coogan says.

Once grant applications are received by the EPA, they go into the agency’s homegrown Next Generation Grants System, a web application running on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system that employs a Java Platform solution. NGGS leverages technologies including Apache web server, JBoss application server and Oracle’s relational database management system.

While NGGS may look complicated from the outside, Coogan says, the solution did its job when EPA needed it most. “I think an observer might come in and say, ‘This is pretty complicated, how you built it,’ but that is what happens when you build to a very specific set of requirements,” he says. “Because it has been built specific to EPA business processes and how our grants programs traditionally run, it largely runs smoothly. Everything is standardized.”

The Power of a Single Platform

In 2015, the Federal Emergency Management Agency  kicked off a grants management modernization program aimed at upgrading and consolidating existing systems and processes.

Since then, FEMA has established a Grants Management Advisory Board representing all agency grant programs and support activities; established the Office of Enterprise Grant Services to standardize and streamline grants management; and created standardized grant policy and guidance.

Perhaps most notable, the agency has built the FEMA Grants Outcomes system, which implements these standardized, streamlined processes in a single IT platform. By consolidating its existing grants management tools into the FEMA GO system, the agency can provide a consistent, simplified user experience for all of its grant programs, says Pamela Williams, acting assistant administrator of the agency’s Grant Programs Directorate.

Over the past year, FEMA completed the process of moving all nondisaster grant programs to FEMA GO for current and future funding opportunities. “Disaster grants will move into FEMA GO in a phased approach, to make sure that the system can fully support disaster grant requirements,” Williams says.

FEMA GO leverages a microservices architecture built on Amazon Web Services cloud solutions, which Williams says allows the agency to improve the efficiency, performance and cost-effectiveness of the system over time using a continuous integration/continuous delivery development approach.

 “This gives FEMA GO the agility and flexibility to quickly react to emergent needs, quickly supporting administration and department priorities and responding to customer requests for enhanced capabilities and user experience improvements,” she says.

Moving to the Cloud

The National Institutes of Health runs the eRA grants management system as a resource for itself and other federal agencies. In 2020, the NIH migrated the production environment — which includes more than 100 integrated IT modules — to AWS, making it the agency’s first enterprise system authorized to operate in a cloud environment.

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“The migration to the AWS cloud was a complex project that involved two years of extensive preparation and coordination,” says an NIH spokesperson. “The cloud migration happened smoothly despite it occurring one month into the COVID-19 pandemic, when all eRA staff were for the first time working remotely, with project planning and collaboration taking place virtually.”

The migration process included extensive testing, a comprehensive communications plan and careful selection of a three-day migration window over an extended weekend to minimize the impact on grant applications and processing.

The eRA system is the largest federal grants management system, accounting for more than 50 percent of the federal grant applications received by Grants.gov. Grant administrators use the system to manage more than $43 billion in awarded grant funding annually, and the system has more than 1 million registered users and 30 million-plus annual logins. According to NIH, the move to the cloud improved system and database performance, security, reliability and scalability, providing users with the best possible experience.