Sneak Preview: HUD Struggles To Timely Issue CDBG-DR Funding
(The following was excerpted from a recent Thompson Grants Compliance Expert article.) While the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) Office of Community Planning and Development (CPD) agreed with a recent HUD Office of Inspector General (OIG) audit recommendation to broaden its existing milestones for tracking the pace of determining allocations and awarding Community Development Block Grant – Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) funds to recipients, it rejected a recommendation to establish timing benchmarks for these internal milestones due to the variations within the CDBG-DR allocation process.
The CDBG-DR program provided about $98 billion between 2001 and 2022 to state and local governments and U.S. territories to help them recover from disasters. OIG evaluated the program to determine whether CPD was issuing CDBG-DR funds in a timely manner.
After a disaster occurs and Congress appropriates funds under supplemental budget packages (i.e., public laws) to provide disaster relief funds, HUD collects data from other federal agencies to develop proposed allocations for recipients under the CDBG-DR program. Once the allocation total is finalized, the HUD Office of Public Affairs announces it to the public using a press release.
When publishing the program’s rules and requirements under a particular funding package, CPD’s disaster recovery and budget offices work together to assign and commit the funds, then CPD drafts a Federal Register notice that contains allocations, waivers and additional requirements, and sends it through HUD’s clearance process. Once cleared, CPD then completes the notice and submits it to the Federal Register to be published.
HUD in February 2022 issued a “consolidated notice,” which only applied to disasters that occurred in 2020, that sought to speed the allocation of funds to recipients by combining previous agency requirements and updates that govern CDBG-DR funds.
OIG found that the average amount of time to allocate and award CDBG-DR funds increased from 275 days in 2004, to 944 days in 2019. For funding affected by the consolidated notice, CPD completed the allocation and grant award for about 87% of these dollars within an average of 385 days. However, as of July 5, 2023, the agency had not awarded grants for the remaining 13% of allocated funds. OIG estimated that if all these grants had been awarded under this allocation as of July 5, 2023, the average days to grant awards would have been 518 days.
(The full version of this story has now been made available to all for a limited time here.)
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