[Jeff Arkin:] Federal grants play an important role in funding our national priorities. Most recently including the COVID 19 pandemic and the federal government's response to it.
At the same time, federal grants represent a substantial financial commitment. In fiscal year 2022, the federal government provided about $1.2 trillion
in assistance to state, local, tribal and territorial governments, and most of this was for grants.
To put that amount in perspective, that assistance accounted for about one out of every five federal dollars spent that year. GAO has an extensive body
of work on federal grants. And today I'm going to talk about some of the broad challenges that we've found in that work for grant recipients and grant applicants. 
These include capacity challenges, challenges with coordinating grant programs across the federal government and challenges with the accuracy and completeness
of information about grant programs available to Congress and to the public.
In terms of capacity, there are various challenges that grant applicants and recipients can encounter. Some grant programs require a local financial commitment, 
and that can be a challenge for communities or local governments with limited financial resources. Human capital capacity can be another challenge. 
Some smaller entities that don't often receive federal funding may have less institutional knowledge or experience with the federal grant process, 
and this could limit smaller entities the ability to fulfill the various requirements associated with grants, such as fulfilling all the legal requirements and reporting requirements.
Another type of challenge involves fragmented or overlapping grant programs. GAO's work has identified areas where there are numerous federal grants that may not be well coordinated. 
And this fragmentation and overlap can cause, can limit cost effectiveness and increase burden for grant recipients. One example that we found in our work is within the area of broadband access. 
In reviewing the range of federal broadband programs, we identified at least 133 programs, including some grant programs that can be used to support broadband access in some way.
And those programs are spread across 15 different federal agencies. This patchwork of fragmented and overlapping programs creates complexity and barriers for potential grant applicants and could 
lead to wasteful duplication of funding and effort. We recommended that the administration create a national broadband strategy to better synchronize these various programs. 
Finally, we've also seen challenges with the transparency of grant spending. A key source of information on federal spending, including on grants, is USAspending.gov, which is the federal government's 
public website that displays information about descriptions and data on federal spending.
And this information can help with policymaking and can also help demonstrate to Congress and to the public how and where federal grant funds are spent. The federal government has made significant strides 
in implementing USAspending over the years. However, through various reviews, we have found some issues with the accuracy and completeness of the data and other information on USAspending.
One example of that is the completeness of information on sub recipients. And so when a federal grant recipient passes through funds to other entities to perform a portion of the work associated with a grant award, 
that information is supposed to be reported in most cases. However, we've found gaps and errors with the cyberwar data on USAspending. One example is our recent review of U.S. funds provided to entities in China.
We were unable to provide a complete accounting of the full extent of all grant and other funding to these entities because of limitations with the completeness and accuracy of of that data, of that subaward data on 
USAspending. And given these and other known challenges, we're currently reviewing some of our data in USAspending and hope to have a report on that later this year.