For federally recognized Tribal Nations, the cost of identifying and applying for funding often exceeds the monetary value of the grants themselves. At the federal level, legacy systems and red tape mean even well-intentioned programs struggle to deliver. Tribal Nations, the intended beneficiaries, are spending more time on paperwork than generating valuable outcomes for their communities. This results in a tremendous amount of waste in tax payers dollars.
Federal funding in the U.S. traces back to 1816, when proceeds from land sales were distributed across the states to drive economic activity and support education. [1]. Federal agencies, operating under the executive branch, independently managed their own funding mechanisms. Without a shared standard, each agency developed its own definitions, leading to conflicting interpretations of contracts, grants and loans. The ‘Federal Grant and Cooperative Agreement Act’ (FGCAA) of 1977 [2] standardized how all federal financial assistance is classified and structured, establishing a unified rulebook for grants, contracts and cooperative agreements. One of the more monumental pieces of legislation specific to tribal communities is the ‘Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act” (ISDEAA). Enacted in 1975, ISDEAA established how federally recognized Tribal Nations received federal funding. Before ISDEAA, federal agencies, like the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), directly controlled programs and spending for tribes. ISDEAA, alongside other critical legislation, enabled tribes to apply and manage grants and cooperative agreements and to enter into compacts in order to operate critical resources like health, education and other social services programs. These acts of legislation built important policy infrastructure to standardize federal funding. However, as agencies took on more responsibility and the size of the federal government grew, the process of getting funding out the door became one of the most complex, capital-driving, and manual processes for federal agencies. BIA and Bureau of Indian Education, under the Department of Interior, and Indian Health Services, under the Department of Health and Human Services, are the three sub agencies tasked with the distribution and management of federal funding to Federally Recognized Tribal Nations. In fiscal year 2024, congress approved approximately $32.6 billion for tribal purpose funding, while significant in appropriated money, a majority of this funding failed to actually reach tribes [3]. The failures trace back to two major problems: the lack of a centralized, reliable source of grant information for tribes, and the excessive red tape involved in applying for and managing funding. Tribal Nations don’t have a centralized source of funding information. The web based tool Grants/gov is the federal clearinghouse for grant information, but agencies often don’t add in the critical information needed for tribes to determine whether an opportunity is a fit or not. This results in a data pool of unstructured information without a certainty on information being available. This is no fault of the federal agencies as they are running on legacy systems trying to get information to tribes, but often get stuck in interagency silos or bogged down by internal red tape. For the programs that do make it on agency websites or Grants/gov, agency staffers often become immediately inundated with requests for additional information, technical assistance, or reviewing applications that were submitted incorrectly. Agencies spend significant staff time and budgets simply navigating the hurdles that come with these processes. On the other side, tribal staff are already stretched thin and sifting through disorganized grant listings. When they finally identify an eligible opportunity, the next challenge is allocating even more time and money to navigate the application hurdles. Often federal funding requires additional, bureaucratic hoops that tribes must jump through in order to simply submit an application. This isn’t a question of intent, federal agencies want grant funding to generate funding outcomes and tribes want to deploy this money to build stronger, safer and healthier communities; it’s the burden of process that has impacted both the agencies and the tribes. Process is a critical component of the funding machine, it ensures rules are followed and parties are held accountable to prevent the waste of tax dollars. Tribal Nations now more than ever need to build capacity to meet these growing requirements, or they risk missing critical funding opportunities.
Tribes today can utilize off the shelf AI technology solutions that are made available to them to reduce the funding identification process from a months long manual effort down to a few minutes. Today’s AI tools can scan all available federal opportunities, review key documentation and eligibility rules, and match programs to tribal needs, all in a single software tool. This means a team of four can handle the workload without adding positions or overhead. The departments that do adopt AI in this space will be enabled to immediately jump into more meaningful work, focusing on outcomes and communities rather than process. On the opposite side of the funding relationship, the Department of the Interior needs to create a uniform source of truth for federally recognized Tribal Nations to not only qualify for funding opportunities, but also simplify the funding application all together. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, a former tech executive, has launched a broader digital modernization push. While this effort hasn’t explicitly focused on grants, it signals the agency’s seriousness about using technology more aggressively than in past administrations. The role AI can play at the federal level is reviewing all previous requirements of grant programming, identifying duplicative efforts in applications, and identifying needless red tape that tribes have to traverse in order to even apply. While there is reasonable caution to have AI review grant applications, AI can certainly reduce the administrative burden of reviewing applications at the surface level to ensure it meets all minimum grant requirements before it’s forwarded to the various program managers at the interior agency. By implementing AI on both sides of the funding process, federal and tribal governments can focus on outcomes, ensuring money not only reaches but also positively impacts communities instead of getting tied up in bureaucracy.
