Grants.gov Strains Under New Demand

An early casualty of the stimulus package was identified by the Office of Management and Budget this week when OMB Director Peter Orszag told agency heads to plan for a possible meltdown of the government's online grantmaking portal. A review of its capacity revealed a "significant risk of failure," Orszag warned in a memo Monday, our colleague Sarah Cohen reports. The memo went on to say that Grants.gov, the site where nonprofit groups and local governments can apply for more than 1,000 competitive grants from 22 federal agencies, is straining under the weight of recent growth. With an expected 60 percent increase in volume because of last month's $787 billion stimulus measure, the system could just break, Orszag said. The expected major surge in applications is likely to take a while to emerge, as agencies write instructions to applicants and settle on conditions and priorities for the grants. But already the system is slowing down, frustrating would-be grantees trying to meet application deadlines and instead getting error messages.