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Why Grants.gov Should Be Abolished

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By Carol Kolmerten

Back in the 20th century, it took what seemed like quite a while -- perhaps an hour or two -- to stand by an old duplicating machine as it churned out pages that we then had to staple together to make the 11 or 14 or 16 copies of a grant proposal that government agencies wanted.

Oh, how those of us at small colleges used to grouse: We imagined that large universities had grants offices with administrative assistants whose job it was to stand by the duplicating machine. "All those copies," we would say. "They just don't understand that at small colleges we don't have help running off all those copies."

Now those of us at small colleges long for those good old days as the advent of the monster Grants.gov has made grant-getting nigh impossible for us.

Recently, I tried to help a faculty member at my college submit a grant proposal to a National Institutes of Health competition. I soon discovered that one can no longer submit a grant to NIH directly. One has to submit it through Grants.gov. I estimate that it took me more than 25 hours to try to submit the grant. After 37 error messages (I have them saved, because no one would believe me without cyber evidence), I am still not sure the proposal was received.

I do not know whose brilliant idea Grants.gov was, but it is clear that, as it now works, it is set up to benefit only large universities with a "grants office." Small colleges suffer when they attempt (or, if my experience is any indication, when they give up attempting) to submit a grant proposal to any federal agency.

At many colleges, like the one where I have taught for 28 years, there is no grants office -- no cadre of workers hired to decipher the unreadable jargon or find the end of the maze that Grants.gov has created to keep applicants away from federal money.

At my college, I am the grants office. And what I am is an English professor who got into the grants business rather by accident, or, I suppose, more accurately, by discovering the satisfaction that one gets from successfully competing for outside money to do something important for students and professors. It all started back in 1983 when I wrote a grant proposal for my department to finance a George Orwell festival. My one (lucky) attempt eventually led to a course release for me to serve as the college's "grants officer." And here I am today, still teaching and still working with faculty members to obtain grants.

Up until the advent of Grants.gov, that task was a pleasant one: I have been blessed to work with faculty members who are eager to write grant proposals and who write well. But now that all government grants must be submitted through a single Web site, my job has become a tedious nightmare, a labyrinth of mazes that I cannot seem to find my way through.

I do not see how we, or any small college without a grants office, are going to be able to compete for government grants any longer. My recent attempt to submit a grant proposal to NIH is a case in point.

At my college, faculty members who want to apply for a major research grant need to let me know at least a month ahead of time. A faculty member I will call "Professor H" reminded me more than three months before the NIH due date that the grant proposal would have to be submitted through Grants.gov and that our college needed to be registered with the site. I checked with our business office to make sure we were registered. We were. In fact, we were one of the first colleges to register. All seemed fine.

Then I registered with NIH's own bureaucracy, the Electronic Research Administration Commons, a process that I took care of two months before the due date, although I am not sure why I needed to create such complicated passwords that I will surely never remember. (Note to self: Set up a spreadsheet to remember all the government-grant-agency passwords.)

Two weeks before the due date, I began editing Professor H's grant and we discussed the grant-submission process. We noted that to submit the grant to "eRA Commons" we would need a particular kind of software that our IT office did not support. As faculty members are not allowed to add software to their college-issued desktops, we faced our first hurdle. The second barrier was that we needed to submit the grant in Adobe Acrobat. As Professor H did not have access to the correct version of Adobe and I did, I agreed to translate her files into the correct version of Adobe and did so, though it took me several hours on my slow laptop, using a dial-up system. I then had to return the files to her -- an equally slow, tedious process.

On the Friday before the grant was due, we sat at Professor H's desktop. I entered my eRA Commons user name and password, and . . . it was refused. (Yes, I am using the passive voice on purpose, as I had no idea who or what was refusing me.)

After concluding that the "submit" button was looking for a Grants.gov user name and password, I raced back to my office, looking for that information in vain. Someone at the help desk at Grants.gov then told me that our controller had to authorize me so I could authorize Professor H's application, despite the fact that we had registered with Grants.gov months earlier.

I located our controller, who tried to register me, but could not without an "M-PIN number." When I called the Grants.gov help desk, to ask what in the world an M-PIN number was, I was told, "A lot of people have been asking what that number is. I have no idea, but I do know that it is usually available in seven to 10 days."

Our controller continued to make phone calls and look in obscure files and, finally, with the help of our assistant treasurer, located our M-PIN number -- the number issued to us by none other than Grants.gov when we registered. After finding that elusive number, our controller was able to "register" me as a user, and I then could authorize Professor H's application.

For a brief moment, late that Friday afternoon, after we pressed "send" and received a "submission successful" message, we celebrated.

What a mistake. By the time I got home that Friday night, I had three error messages waiting for me on my computer that said, and I quote: "NIH has received the electronic application titled . . . that was submitted through Grants.gov. The Commons User ID that was to be supplied as the Credential for the Senior/Key Person Profile component was missing, or was an invalid user ID. This application must be corrected and the entire application submitted through Grants.gov, using the Changed/Corrected Application submission type."

Huh? What was a "Commons User ID"? Was it different from the user name? What was a "Senior/Key Person Profile component"? We had never seen those categories when we filled out the forms.

The entire grant proposal had 16 separate files. Were we to submit them all again?

Little did I know that we would submit the entire application some 13 times before it would go through. Apparently we had not filled in one name in capital letters, and that generated the first set of error messages, which, of course, mentioned nothing about capital letters.

I tried responding to the automatic e-mail error messages generated by Grants.gov, saying I needed help, but each one was then "closed" by some unknown Grants.gov cyber phantom. I wrote back again and again saying that my request for help was, indeed, not "closed" -- that I still needed help.

I begged for help. I groveled. But to no avail. No human being from Grants.gov responded to my messages; I received only automated responses. I also left long messages on the voice mail of the poor NIH program officer who was in charge of the competition. He, I am certain, thought I was deranged.

By the end of that weekend, I was certain that either I was deranged or something was terribly wrong with this process. I counted the e-mail messages I had received from Grants.gov and NIH within a 48-hour period. It was 58 -- yes, fifty-eight -- and wondered if I would ever have the energy to do this again because I am convinced that it will only be more complicated next time.

Once Grants.gov accepted the proposal, the NIH rejected it. In the wonderful Catch-22 universe we had entered, we could not reapply without a federal ID number, and we could not get the federal ID number until the application was accepted. We needed a real person at NIH (someone who read one of my desperate e-mail messages) to resubmit it for us (three times) before it was finally accepted.

We think.

If you are confused by this point, you can imagine how frustrating the process was to me and to Professor H. Part of my job is to encourage faculty members to write grants, but who will want to do that when the application process takes longer than writing the proposal?

If faculty members at small colleges are to compete in the government grant-getting business, the process needs to be changed:

• First, Grants.gov personnel need to use clear English, eliminating undefined acronyms in all of the Web site's directions and in e-mail correspondence. What is a CCR, Ebiz POC, AOR, or a CFDA, anyway?

• If we can't abolish Grants.gov (my first choice), someone needs to clarify what "registration" means and which people in the organization need to be registered. And which passwords and user names need to be used in each submission.

• Everyone at Grants.gov needs to know what an M-PIN number is (as Grants.gov is the organization that created that monstrosity) instead of laughing at me when I ask what it is and where I can get one.

• Government-grant applications need to be downloadable. Period.

• People who submit grants to federal agencies should be able to submit a government grant proposal in one file, in Word format. Submitting file after file over the course of several hours, is an unnecessary complication and a waste of time. And having to resubmit the entire proposal, again and again, for one word that lacked a capital letter is ludicrous.

• Federal agencies would be wise to emulate the clear directions of the National Endowment for the Humanities for registering with Grants.gov; NEH defines the acronyms and offers tips along with a column explaining the amount of time each step takes.

• Finally, I know from talking to people who award government grants that Grants.gov is a headache for them as well -- adding a useless layer of bureaucracy and moving program officers one additional step away from grant applicants.

Little do many applicants know, for example, that Grants.gov's super technology does not recognize the quotation marks in most software packages and, thus, the polished perfect draft we used to be able to send off now reaches panelists with question marks in the place of all quotation marks. "Our Submission of 'Special' Systems in Synchronic Symmetry" now reads ?Our Submission of ?Special? Systems in Synchronic Symmetry?

Got it?