How AI is helping local governments access federal grant funding

The federal government releases billions of dollars to local governments annually, but many governments struggle to capture and utilize the money meant for them.

Local governments miss funding meant for them due to a process of friction at every step, including red tape in the funding process, outdated digital infrastructure, sub-par private market solutions and the need for human staffing in historically understaffed positions. Artificial intelligence is beginning to change this landscape and enables governments to do more with less.

The Identification and Duplicity Challenge

For city managers, department directors, tribal administrators and other public sector officials looking to pursue funding, this process takes weeks or months of manual effort. Grants.gov, the centralized platform for all funding opportunities at the federal level offers a search feature where users are able to filter by funding agency, status, and general categories like “Agriculture” and “Housing.” The identification step of the process requires a large amount of time consuming work. 

Public sector officials have to navigate zip files with documents of more than 400 pages to find one piece of information, and struggle through an endless loop of links and redirects. Additionally, governments grapple with duplicity among federal grant funding, as multiple awards for the same purpose from different agencies create confusion among applicants. AI-powered tools cut through this complexity by aggregating opportunities across agencies and databases into a single searchable platform.

The Applications and Capacity Gap

No two applications are the same, even those distributed by the same funding agency. Not only do applicants need to spend time identifying the opportunity in the first place, but then comes the lengthy process of figuring out what exactly the application requires. 

Notice of Funding Opportunity, or NOFOs, with all of the information needed can be hundreds of pages long, and applicants are left to search and sift through to find the key information they need. Communities also need to communicate with the funding agency during the identification process or during the actual application writing. However, it can take weeks or months to receive a response.

In his opening statement at a committee hearing on community access to federal grant funding, U.S. Sen. Gary Peters of Michigan noted that over 50 federal grant-making agencies distribute funds for more than 1,900 grant programs. Each one of those grant opportunities come with an application unique to that grant. 

To stress the difficulty in capturing funding, look at rural local governments. These governments operate with small teams that must compete with larger governments who have dedicated grant writers and significantly more staff. The time and money spent applying for a funding opportunity is often greater than the actual award amount. Due to the capacity issues that arise within a rural setting, whether it be lack of resources, staff, or capital, these communities struggle to be awarded funding. 

In FEMA’s Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program, seven low-capacity counties were awarded $50 million in funding while 70 high-capacity counties were awarded $1.5 billion that same year. When awards are not granted, this means months of effort across an organization were done with nothing to show for it, ultimately putting financial stress on communities across the country. Technology solutions are enabling small teams to process application requirements faster and compete more effectively with better-resourced governments.

Implementing AI Solutions

The age of AI enables governments to do more with less, enabling money to get to where it’s supposed to go and reduce tax-payer waste. In the context of funding for local governments, AI reduces friction areas of identifying, qualifying and pursuing funding. 

Small teams in local governments are able to pull in opportunities across federal and state databases, websites and NOFOs instead of visiting site by site, reading folder by folder. AI simplifies the 90-page notice of funding and requirements documents into simple digestible paragraphs and step by step instructions, which enables faster opportunity qualification. Application documents are pulled from their entombed zip folders and auto-elevated into a to-do list where government staff can collaborate in real time.

How Technology Empowers Small Governments

The impact of adopting technology for local governments translates into fiscal and human savings while driving funding outcomes to communities that need it the most. The translation into outcomes comes from two primary capacity drivers for local governments adopting AI. 

The first is the volume of opportunities reviewed. Governments who are able to identify the universe of funding available to them, qualify them, and determine whether to pursue in days are able to review many more opportunities than those without AI drivers. 

The second capacity driver is in human talent. Governments adopting AI are able to empower their small teams to do the work of teams double or triple the size. This, in turn, reduces the need to spend dollars in talent attraction, retention and development.

AI adoption in local governments directly addresses the structural barriers of funding by cutting down the time and resources needed to identify, qualify, and apply for opportunities. By enabling small teams to process more opportunities and operate at higher capacity, technology ensures federal dollars reach communities more efficiently.

Dhruv C. Patel is the CEO and co-founder of Syncurrent, an AI platform that identifies relevant federal and state funding opportunities for local and tribal governments.