Grant Reporting Efficiency and Agreements Transparency Act of 2019

Floor Speech

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Mr. CUMMINGS. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Madam Speaker, the Grant Reporting Efficiency and Agreements Transparency Act, introduced by Representatives Virginia Foxx and Jimmy Gomez, would standardize reporting for recipients of Federal grants and cooperative agreements.

Grant recipients often have to report the same information in different ways because Federal agencies do not use the same forms or even the same terms to describe required information.

Madam Speaker, I have often said that the most important thing that we must do in our lives is to operate in an effective and efficient manner, and that also includes this Congress.

Under this bill, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget and the Secretary of Health and Human Services would be required to establish governmentwide data standards for grant reporting--again, efficiency and effectiveness.

The bill would encourage OMB and HHS to make the information that grant recipients report fully searchable and machine-readable. This would provide greater transparency into the money spent on the grants because spending data would be more usable.

The bill also would require that data collected from grant recipients be published on a single public portal.

Madam Speaker, I thank the distinguished gentlewoman, Ms. Foxx, for working with Representative Connolly last Congress on the use of nonproprietary identifiers for grants and grantees. She, too, has worked in a hard, bipartisan way to bring solutions to problems, to bring practical solutions to problems.

The bill before us would allow this issue to be carefully considered to ensure it is workable.

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Mr. CUMMINGS. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Madam Speaker, this bill is intended to reduce the burden on applicants for Federal grants by enabling a more streamlined electronic process for completing grant applications. It would require HHS and OMB to develop uniform data standards for common application elements, such as the name and address of the organization and the name of the grant.

This will, hopefully, lead to the development of a uniform grant application that could be used across all Federal agencies. That would improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the grant application process immensely.

Madam Speaker, I urge all Members to support this measure, and I hope that the Senate will quickly pass it.

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Mr. CUMMINGS. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Madam Speaker, I again thank Ms. Foxx for this very important legislation and all of the bipartisan efforts that made it happen.

This bill and the others that we have dealt with today, where there was such great bipartisanship to get it done, I hope that we will take these as a model of what this Congress can do.

Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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