The Trump administration has sent hundreds of organizations reeling with abrupt terminations of grants to support youth justice, child welfare services, AmeriCorps and after-school programs. Those actions have drawn headlines in The Imprint and many other outlets, and their legality is being challenged in court.
Now, a new concern has popped up: What happens to the money appropriated for this year that hasn’t even been awarded yet? Close observers of federal spending in the youth and family space worry that if grants to support homeless youth, mentoring programs, delinquency prevention efforts and research do not get out the door by the end of fiscal year 2025, that money could simply vanish, returned to the Department of the Treasury.
There is a general flow to how competitive grants go from the federal coffers into the accounts of nonprofits, colleges, tribes, and state and local governments. It begins with a Notice of Funding Opportunity, which provides the particulars around eligibility and allowable uses for a certain grant, as well as the deadline for an application to receive one.
Those notices are vetted through department officials and counsel before becoming public. This applies to new hopeful grantees or groups seeking renewal at the end of a grant cycle; if you are in year two of a three-year grant, for example, no need for re-applying at the moment.
The length of time might vary a bit from grant to grant, but in general, applicants will have about 60 days from the time of the notice to submit for federal funding. And then, the government needs at least 60 days to conduct peer review, agency review and then announce the winners.
“So you need 120 days even in the best of circumstances,” said Darla Bardine, executive director of the National Network for Youth, which advocates for policies and funding to help runaway and homeless youth. There are just under 80 days until the end of the fiscal year now.
Youth homelessness services are not entirely funded by the feds, who kick in about $146 million every year. Most of that money will go to groups who are in the second or third year of a grant cycle, but about 40% is slated for either new awardees or those up for renewal, according to Bardine.
Providers in that space — which operate shelters, transitional living programs and street outreach programs — were waiting all spring for some indication of a grant competition this year.
The New Hampshire nonprofit Waypoint has four runaway and homeless youth grants up for renewal in 2025, totaling about $2 million, according to CEO Borja Alvarez de Toledo. It operates a maternity home, a transitional living program, a crisis shelter and a street outreach program.
Having not heard any information on the funding picture for 2025, New Hampshire Sen. Jeanne Shaheen inquired on Waypoint’s behalf about the status of runaway and homeless youth grants. She got a response, Alvarez de Toledo said: the process will begin in “late spring, early summer.”
That time frame came and went. Later in the summer, he said, a Waypoint staff brought up the 2025 grants in a meeting with an Administration for Children and Families official, asking if they knew if funding would be forthcoming.
“They said, ‘I’m not in position to answer that question,’” said Alvarez de Toledo.
Finally, late last week, the notices for most runaway and homeless youth services were posted, with a significant change included. There would be no separate lane for street outreach work; some grantees would be required to fold street work into their operation, and others would have the option to do so.
The deadline for submitting materials for the grant was set for July 23, meaning that providers have just 14 days including weekends to complete a process they usually had at least two months to handle. There are also new requirements, including signed memorandums of agreement with local law enforcement that must be procured and submitted along with a grant application.
“The turnaround for submission is deeply concerning,” said Kendra Phillips, executive director of Jackson Street Youth Services in Oregon. Her organization will have to shift staff from direct services to help and force some employees to cancel summer vacations to make the deadline.
“A 14-day window places significant strain on our program and administrative staff and compromises the quality and thoughtfulness of proposals,” Phillips said. The National Network for Youth has called for people to contact members of Congress asking them to help get the administration to extend the deadline and restore the street outreach program.
It is not entirely clear that such a tight timeline is permissible. The Code of Federal Regulations says that notices of funding opportunities should be available for “at least 60 days.” It also says agencies may go lower than that, but that “no funding opportunity should be available for less than 30 calendar days unless the Federal agency determines that exigent circumstances justify this.”
[Update: Since the publication of this article, HHS has extended the deadline for applications by five days; so still not the minimum 30 days that appears to be required, but some breathing room for potential grantees].
For these runaway and homeless youth grants, there will be a little over two months for a review and award process, which is more than will be available for other expected 2025 grants still waiting on the starting gun. The Administration for Children and Families had forecasted a total of 43 notice of funding opportunities for this fiscal year, according to a former official of the agency. Few of them have even made it to a public notice, and almost none have actually led to grant approvals.
Over at the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention at the Justice Department, there were 37 funding opportunities posted in fiscal 2024. This year, 13 have gone out, all issued by the Biden administration before the inauguration. Those were mostly pulled back, no funding opportunities have been posted by the office since inauguration, and no grants have been announced.
So what happens if grantees aren’t chosen by the time a fiscal year ends? Katie Meyer Scott of the National Homelessness Law Center, said she is trying to figure that out.
“If the funding is not obligated (by a legally binding agreement) by the end of the ‘period of availability,’ the funding will expire unless reappropriated by Congress,” Scott said in an email to Youth Services Insider. What she is trying to determine is whether that “period of availability” ends at the conclusion of the fiscal year.