Donna Shelley asks a perceptive question in response to my post on how Upward Bound means more narrative confusion:
Why is this [grant-making process] done at all? It continues to be a mystery to me. What is the point of grant making? If it is to give money to a qualified applicant, then what are all these games about? It appears that making the process as arcane and frankly, insane as possible.
There are at least two big issues here: why does the U.S. grant-making system persist in the weird way it does, and how did it evolve into its current state? My guess is that the two are linked, and the big reason it remains involve signaling. By creating byzantine, inefficient requirements for distributing money, government agencies and, to a lesser extent, foundations, ensure that the only people who will bother are the ones who really, really want the money.
The devotion of resources to a pointless-seeming endeavor signals the applicant’s commitment. Applicants who care the most will invest the most in deciphering RFPs, and those who don’t care as much won’t. The grant-maker can’t tell who is qualified, but they grant-maker can try to get applicants to signal their quality (one sees something similar in college applications: most colleges teach orders of magnitude more than high schools do, so one could see high school as a long signaling process for college, which is part of Bryan Caplan’s argument in his forthcoming book The Case Against Education). In this reading, insanity becomes sane because funders are trying to gauge the fundee’s commitment level using the best tools they have, which aren’t very good.
Professional grant writers—like us—are a logical byproduct of this process: many nonprofit and public agencies specialize in providing services rather than in writing abstruse, detailed proposals. So people who are good at service delivery specialize at that, and they don’t specialize in plumbing, vehicle repair, grant writing, and so forth. This may also be why nonprofits find it hard to hire good grant writers: most don’t actually specialize in grant writing.
If you’re curious about how signaling works more generally, there is a rich evolutionary biology literature summarizing it.
The next sentence is the sort that, like any sentence using the phrase “the Progressive Era,” may come dangerously close to boring you to death, but bear with it and me. As far as I can tell, the roots of the grant-making process lies in political reforms that got started in the Progressive Era and reached their culmination in the 1960s. Prior to the 1930s and the New Deal, the Federal government and state governments basically didn’t spend enough money to have a grant-making apparatus and bureaucracy like they do now. To the extent such activities happened at all, services were provided directly, or via pass-throughs straight to agencies.
Such practices engendered lots of corruption—see further Chicago, New Jersey, All the King’s Men, etc. In addition, there were problems related to whether, say, the feds in DC actually had any idea what people in urban Chicago, or rural Mississippi, or Oxnard, California, might actually need. So the inability to decide need and the problem of corruption yielded a solution: instead of the feds (or state governments) simply funding services directly or picking organizations to run programs, they’d run competitions to see who has the best proposal for the provision of services.
This being the government, however, anything that starts simple rapidly complexifies, like cellular automata (for another example of this phenomenon, see the tax code). So over the last couple of decades, Congress creates lots of well-meaning laws; rule-making bodies make well-meaning rules; courts probably throw their spices into the broth; some organizations steal or misuse the money, thus leading to more rules so that Won’t Happen Again; and finally one gets to something like Upward Bound, which was the subject of my original post, and had something like a hundred pages of guidance written in a style only especially obtuse lawyers could love. Not only that, but the difficulty of understanding an entire RFP becomes hard even for the agency issuing the RFP, which increases the likelihood of errors or internal contradictions on their part—without even discussing the grant writers who are trying to decipher the instructions.
Around the office, we’ve observed that a lot of grant applications could be done via postcard: will you perform these services for x participants over y months and achieve z outcomes? Then you’re in the running. If that happened, we’d be out of business, of course, but there’s no real political constituency for the simplification of the grant-making process. There is a real constituency for the simplification of the tax code, and that’s an issue that’s gone nowhere and appears likely to continue to go nowhere, like that one bridge.
From the outside looking in, a grant or research solicitation process might appear like the streets of Santa Fe (Will Rodgers: “Whoever designed the streets in Santa Fe must have been drunk, and riding backwards on a mule.” [other versions are not so PC]), but in most cases the compilation of a solicitation isn’t arbitrary except in how some things might have been forgotten in the complex process. The reality of most solicitations is framed by their having a joint contracting and functional purpose. The awarded proposals should be both compliant with the goals of the solicitation as well as legal to award. It is this convolution that usually confuses the respondants, as well as most of the solicitation participants in the process.
So with the first step in framing a solicitation being identifying “What do you want” (aka drafting a Statement of Work or Statement of Objectives, or the like) we generally still have some clarity in what is being solicited. The trouble then begins with two subsequent processes: identifying funding sources for the solicitation and establishing what the estimated costs of the objectives should be. Both of these lead to frequent contradictions with the original goals statements. First, if the funds are just coming from Mr. GotBucks-Do-Good Foundation, then as long as the goals are compatible with foundation charter, there is little confusion. But put two foundations together, or add in some government, and now you have to satisfy chaotic and apparently arbitrary committee processes. Any government involvement whatsoever in fact brings in a whole set of guidelines, regulations, and laws which might contradict or constrain some or most of the original solicitation goals. So these new internal contradictions start to embed themselves into the solicitation.
Establishing a basis for estimated costs is more subtle. Especially in government contracts or grants, it is illegal for the government to solicit work at below cost rates, except on a firm fixed price basis, and even firm fixed price contracts are circumscribed in their applicability to low risk, commodity types of acquisitions. Research or studies are not low risk, especially with academics being involved. So an estimate gets prepared, often with confidence levels estimated for the estimate, and then funding available and work needed is compared to the estimate. If these are not consistent, then something has to be again compromised. As before, usually the work description gets altered in mysterious ways by contract pricing people who know nothing about the actual work being solicited.
The culmination is the final review process. This is where you have contracting officers telling research scientists how to do research more effectively, and have scientists telling contracting officers how to write contracts. Sausage making at its best, and everybody wears the nasty parts of the pig home afterwards. Compromises that never should have been made are done just to end the misery. So when the final solicitation is released, it should not be shocking that the result is less than coherent. The butt of the joke is not the respondants however, it is the solicitation evaluators who have to make sense out of proposals and the solicitation, which all together might make deciphering the Dead Sea Scrolls appear trivial. By the way, their write ups also have to satisfy reviews by the geniuses who did the sausage making in putting together the solicitation in the first place. By this point the biggest threat participants can wield is forcing the solicitation to be redone entirely. (“Requiring security clearances has impared the competitive environment….” and the like.)
So why don’t soliciting agencies follow the OP’s “grant applications could be done via postcard: will you perform these services for x participants over y months and achieve z outcomes”, etc. Two hypotheses:
1. The likelihood of reducing the solicitation criteria to such simple terms is probably irreducibly small within the processes outlined above. Plus, managing such an award would be trivialized, which brings up the question of what is the need to spend so much money to get this done anyway if it can be described in only a postcard?
2. The process for solicition, evaluating, managing, and contracting for grants or funded research has a life unto itself, put charitably. Less charitably: “If you are not part of the Solution, being part of the Problem gives Job Security.”
Most likely #2 is correct, which is good for grant writers among others.
Thanks for the rather lengthy reply. I understand the arguments you make. My career in grant writing began in my capacity as a museum professional. Hence, even though I am a professional grant writer these days, my perspective continues to be from the non-profit’s side. You touched on this in your response. When one is operating a small institution with a tight budget, and without the luxury of of a lot of staff, grant writing is a considerable investment in time and is often being done by the executive director. Frankly, I always made certain that the grants for which I was competing were suited to who we were as an institution (budget, staffing, ability to do what we promised), but would be more than a little baffled to see 80 pages of instruction for a grant DESIGNED for an institution exactly like the one I was running. The issue is that the money is often not going to institutions for which it was intended because those places cannot afford to hire people like me who specialize in grant writing and they just don’t have the time to do it themselves. So, while I agree that if your organization has the staffing and the time to commit to larger asks from agencies known for their complex RFPs, then that’s fine. But why make them so arcane that the intended recipient can’t even begin to think of making an application?
“But why make them so arcane that the intended recipient can’t even begin to think of making an application?”
Being an engineer, I’ll say:
“The lawyers and contracting people made me do it!”
They would of course respond:
“That is the law.”
or
“The engineers don’t know what they want.”
The reality is that what used to be charity or partnership research has been transformed into a big business.
[...] Why There is no Free Grant Writing Lunch and You Won’t Find Writers for Nothing” and “Why Fund Nonprofits, Public Agencies, and Other Organizations Through Grant Applications At All?“). I think the basic problem is that a lot of people feel like nonprofit and public agencies [...]