k-12 Tax & $pending climate:”More than 74% of federal grant funding could not be tracked to any local level (zip code, city, or county) in our review”

Project on Government Oversight:

• That is $712.6 billion in federal spending that the public can’t tell exactly where it went beyond the state locations.

Subaward reporting, required by federal law, should explain where federal funds go after being awarded to intermediary recipients such as state agencies. The subaward data, however, is fundamentally broken and incomplete, offering little to no additional information on the flow of federal funds.

• In our review, prime awards only had local-level data for 20.7% ($198.3 billion) of awarded federal grant funds.
• Subaward data only accounted for an additional 5% ($47.6 billion) of federal grant dollars that could be tracked to the local level.

According to our review, the vast majority of direct payments were trackable to the local level, though a few programs showed signs of significant errors in the data. However, the granularity of the local place of performance for these awards was limited.