Readers occasionally ask why our e-mail newsletter lacks key data about funding, like the maximum size of a grant or the amount of money available. We always have the same answer: we present whatever information we can find from the funding source. When we write “N.A.,” it’s not because we’re trying to hide data—it’s because we don’t have it.
Take, for example, the Small, Rural School Achievement Program, which you might have seen in last week’s newsletter. The Federal Register notice offers almost no information. The Grants.gov synopsis is little better. I read both, trying to find answers.
I didn’t find any, but I did learn that the Small, Rural School Achievement Program is offering formula grants, so the Department of Education may simply divide up the pie on a per-capita basis, or use some similar scheme. But they don’t tell you, so that’s just a reasonable guess on my part.
Other times, we get weird data and simply report what we find. Take the “Portable Assistance Program,” which offers funds to “provide services and/or develop small business assistance products that are centered on a replicable plan of action to increase small business success and viability in communities suffering economic hardship.” Aside from that description having a lot of words without a lot of content—what does a “replicable plan of action” mean? McDonald’s has one of those too, I think, and so do many science fiction monsters—the program has $1,080,542 available to make 11 grants of at most $100,000. If you can do elementary math, you’re probably wondering why they didn’t shoot for 10 grants or try to get a larger budget allocation. I don’t know. Someone in the bowels of the Small Business Administration might, but that person isn’t me.
i’m guessing that a lot of the reason is political earmarking, either so they can spread $$ across selected districts or cuz the administration needs to make splashes in certain election markets
What’s your experiential opinion ?
What’s your experiential opinion ?
We’re not really sure and don’t have an effective way of finding out. We suspect that different programs might have different reasons for including or not including information.
Having personal experience with the process for allocating award quotas against solicitation topics for USAF and MDA SBIR and STTR research contracts, I can say that the major motives are:
1. Risk adversion. The evaluation process often uses rapid, superficial methods against generic program level goals. So good proposals will be ‘missed’ if funding/award is high thereby decreasing total awards within limited funding. This of course tends to underfund every award, but consider the converse also. It also minimizes the overfunding of bad awards (which are a significant cost to the overall program, in hindsight).
2.There is a fixed cost per award in the solicitation, evaluation, contracting, and technical administration process. I’d guess for every $1M award there are at least $200k of these costs. This would imply that increasing the funding per award is a good idea, which for any researcher trying to augment his own efforts with contracted SBIR research constitutes a perennial gripe about how the SBIR and STTR programs are inefficiently run.
3. As noted in prior comments, there is the political dimension which is just as significant as any of the rest. This exhibits itself in two ways: the admin offices publish statistics in which numbers of completed projects and phase 1 to phase 2 transitions are depicted as ‘good’ parameters. That constitutes a logical fallacy (‘begging the question’) where the presumption that all the awards are effective or beneficial is never proven. Which leads to the second political dimension: more awards decreases the number of solicitation protests. There is nothing like a legal protest to make an admin office’s life a misery. The GAO investigates the whole process, inevitably finding out things that are deficient and leading to conclusions that actually cause government civilians to lose their jobs. The easiest way to avoid that fate is to ‘spread the awards around’.
4. Finally, there is the intrinsic dimension to effective work in any specific area. After participating in ONR SBIR evaluations, I was struck by their relative small award size compared to USAF or MDA. But most of them were for microelectronic component development and I suppose that $200k-500k would be an effective award size. Compared to that, most of the USAF or MDA awards are in the $750k-1M range for work which is either more theoretically and experimentally extensive or requires expensive machining and proof of principle demonstrations in simulated space or missile system tests. Consequently a very few awards are in the $2M range. But there is a legal limit to any phase 2 award, which might well have changed upwards in the 2012 DoD authorizations.
Overall, any large grant or contract portfolio is going to have similar criteria and limits. The established participants in the system usually favor larger awards, given that they will have to write or evaluate fewer proposals. The bureaucrats and new participants tend to favor more and smaller awards.
Incidently, the subject of Congressional Add[-On]s came up above, and none of this applies to those. Adds are a simple function of who-ya-know and political pull. The executive agencies hate them, as they are deducted directly from the agency authorizations thereby diminishing regular program funding (to include SBIR and STTR funding). They are generally a negative sum game for the agencies who have to administer them.