Putting things in perspective...

There is so much misinformation published, it is a constant echo that serves little good. The referenced article, although recently republished, merits updating.

We seven in the PMO are responsible for ensuring that nearly twenty percent of the Federal budget, >$526 billion, expended annually via grants in >900 programs in 26 grant-making agencies get out to the public.

All things considered, we do a fairly admirable job. For the record, the Grants community has and or is moving away from PureEdge. IBM did an admirable job at adapting PureEdge to Mac - and they ought to be commended for their efforts. Their efforts occurred a long, long time ago. The transition will to Adobe, nearly 80% complete, be be finalized by December 31st, 2008. We have no records, from applicants or agencies, documenting recent problems expressed in the article. But if problems have recently been experienced, we would like to hear of them and address & fix them.

As for the cost, well - suffice it to say the taxpayer's monies are very well spent; Grants.gov costs less than 0.000026% of the total Grants monies it services. What a metric to define success.

On a typical day >350 transactions are conducted at the Grants.gov website.

On a particularly active day >2800 transactions are conducted at the Grants.gov website.

On a typical day Grants.gov disseminates 615,881 emails to its customers. To date, >30,000,000 emails have been sent in FY2008.

As of April 30, 2008 Grants.gov is supporting 11,957 open opportunities with 66,147 forms supporting the opportunities.

And there is more...

The Grants.gov Advantages.
- Principal beneficiary: Public

• Permits one-stop-shopping for public (vice the former method wherein public had to access >100 sites) to review of federal grant opportunities
• Inasmuch as the presentation of grant opportunities can be standardized, they now are (prior to Grants.gov, this was not the case)
• Federal grant-related forms are now standardized & maintained by Grants.gov

- Beneficiary: Grantor departments and agencies

• Grant-making redundancy significantly reduced
• Dollar savings to federal government estimated in hundreds of millions of dollars; more than enough to pay for Grants.gov

- Beneficiary: federal government

• Grants.gov brought a change in culture of government grant-making operations
• Grants.gov assisted in bringing grant-making departments and agencies to come together and cooperate for the first time & the cooperation between and amongst the departments via the GMLOB and GPC has never been richer and more productive

To say I am proud of Grants.gov is an understatement. We're doing well and know it. We can do better and we know this also.