… and if if they say they approved it, you still don’t know if the money will actually arrive, and if it arrives, you aren’t confident that you should spend it. When I was teaching we always had the same department chairman because he could write grant proposals that got approved. He had a ‘grant dictionary’ that included the key terms to use when creating the proposals that constantly seem to produce winners.

Had some painful and expensive experiences with ‘free government money’, to the point that I wouldn’t bid on any government work at any level, and my subcontracting included some really nasty provisions in the agreement with the prime contractor.

OT: the instructor in my main data base class used government requests for bids to show how easy it was to design a totally worthless system. People who don’t understand the capabilities and limitations of computers should never be allow to write specifications. He worked for a major IT contractor and the RFBs were real projects that they were paid big bucks to implement, but even bigger bucks to make functional via change orders.

Grant applications are The Government Paperwork from Hell. You don’t get anything for less than a two-dozen page form, plus attachments. And woe betide you if you type anything outside the lines…

It’s a lot quicker when you provide the bank codes … now if I just knew Jamie Dimon’s account number … 😈