Sneak Preview: ED Backtracks on Use of 2024 UG for All Awards
(The following was excerpted from a recent Thompson Grants Compliance Expert article.) Department of Education (ED) grant recipients should be aware that the agency recently reversed course on a previous action that would have created more grant administrative uniformity for all of its awardees.
When the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) revised the uniform guidance (2 C.F.R. Part 200) in April 2024, it stated that the revisions generally would become effective for awards issued on or after Oct. 1, 2024, although agencies could implement the provisions within the guidance for awards as early as June 21. In a Jan. 16, Federal Register notice issued during the Biden administration, ED noted that the 2024 uniform guidance revisions “provided new flexibilities and due process protections to grantees, and also clarified several grant requirements.”
To allow these flexibilities to apply uniformly to ED grantees, the Jan.16 notice updated the terms and conditions of ED grants to clarify — at least at the time when this notice was issued — that the 2024 revised guidance would apply to all ED grants subject to the uniform guidance, even those awards issued prior to the Oct. 1, 2024, effective date that would have followed a prior version of the guidance.
ED stated in the notice that grantees would not automatically receive a new printed Grant Award Notice (GAN), and would not be required to take any action “other than continuing to draw down funds to take advantage of this change,” but they were encouraged to maintain a copy of the Jan. 16 notice within their grant files as documentation for grant management and auditing purposes.
Regardless of the agency’s intent to enable recipients to take advantage of the benefits of the 2024 revisions, the notice sparked certain questions from those in the grants community, particularly related to audits of these awards. For example, when monitoring awards for an audit period July 1, 2024, to June 30, 2025, would the auditor apply the old rules to the first six months, and then start applying an updated set of rules after Jan. 16? If awardees failed “maintain a copy of the notice within their grant files” but began applying the 2024 uniform guidance provisions, would their auditors be aware of this change when determining findings? Also, if an auditee expends under $1 million annually, when would this new audit threshold apply to ED awards? Moreover, would ED, now under the new Trump administration, ensure that it addressed all these questions as part of its program audit guidance in the 2025 Compliance Supplement?
Answering these questions became moot on Feb. 10, when the agency issued a second Federal Register notice that withdrew the Jan. 16 notice.
(The full version of this story has now been made available to all for a limited time here.)
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