Duplicative Grant Consolidation Act
The Duplicative Grant Consolidation Act aims to reduce waste and fraud in federal grant programs by preventing awards to applicants who submit duplicative or fraudulent applications. It requires the executive agencies to coordinate when an applicant has already applied for or received another grant for the same or substantially similar purpose, with an exception for institutions of higher education. It also mandates the creation of an Office of Management and Budget (OMB) tracking and deconfliction system to help agencies verify prior grant activity before awarding new grants, and it calls for an evaluation of using artificial intelligence to identify duplicative applications and potential waste, fraud, or abuse. In short, the bill seeks to centralize detection of duplicative or fraudulent grant activity, centralize decision-making on which agency should award a grant when duplications exist, and explore advanced tools (AI) to aid these efforts.
Key Points
- 1Prohibition on duplicative awards: An agency may not award a grant to an applicant that has received another grant from a different executive agency for the same or identical purpose; higher education institutions are exempt from this prohibition.
- 2Joint determination of award location: If duplicative applications exist, the heads of the involved agencies (and their Inspectors General) must jointly determine which agency should award the grant.
- 3Prohibition on fraudulent applications: Agencies may not award grants to applicants determined to have submitted fraudulent applications for those grants.
- 4Tracking and deconfliction system: Within one year, OMB must provide an electronic system for agency heads and Inspectors General to check whether an applicant has received or applied for other grants for the same or identical purpose, including key data like awardee name, principal investigator, award period, point of contact, and abstract.
- 5Deconfliction criteria (essentially equivalent work): The system must help determine if the same or substantially similar research is proposed or funded across multiple grants or agencies, including (a) substantially the same research proposed to one agency, (b) the same research proposed to multiple agencies, or (c) closely related objectives/designs across proposals/awards, regardless of funding source.