There are no specific government-wide training standards or training requirements for the federal grant workforce; however, the administration has taken some steps toward developing such standards. Between 2004 and 2011, a work group within the administration’s Grants Policy Committee (GPC) studied the issue of training and certifying the grant workforce, which led to a number of recommendations. However, the work group’s recommendations were never formally adopted by the GPC. In 2011, OMB formed the Council on Financial Assistance Reform (COFAR), an interagency group of executive branch officials, to replace the GPC and another federal board—the Grants Executive Board—with the stated aim of creating a more streamlined and accountable structure to coordinate financial assistance, including grants. In November 2012, just over a year after it was created, COFAR identified the need to develop a qualified and professional workforce as one of five priorities to guide its work on grants management reform in the coming years. To accomplish this, COFAR set five goals: Establish core competencies for grants managers by September 2013. Develop a baseline body of knowledge as a shared resource by September 2013. Establish a government-wide resource repository for federal grants professionals by September 2013. Provide training for core competencies by September 2014. Establish certification standards by September 2015. In developing proposals for grants training, COFAR considered the process and requirements that are in place for training the federal acquisitions workforce. Federal agencies generally do not need explicit statutory authority to make particular acquisitions of goods or services. However, for the procurement of goods and services, federal executive agencies are governed by a set of requirements specified in the Federal Acquisition Regulation. Congress has recognized the need for a professional acquisitions workforce by requiring executive agencies to establish management policies and procedures for the effective management of this workforce—including education, training, and career development. Several governmental organizations play critical roles in assisting agencies to build and train their acquisitions workforce. These organizations include OMB’s Office of Federal Procurement Policy, which provides government-wide guidance on managing the acquisitions workforce, and the Federal Acquisition Institute, which promotes the development of the civilian acquisitions workforce. In contrast to acquisitions, federal agencies do not have inherent authority to enter into grant agreements without affirmative authorizing legislation. Consequently, each federal grant program has legislation that identifies the types of activities that it can fund and the purposes it is to accomplish. Frequently, the authorizing legislation that establishes a particular grant program will define the program objectives and leave the administering agency to fill in the details through regulation. In addition to specific statutory requirements, OMB issues administrative requirements in the form of circulars. These circulars provide government-wide guidance that sets standards for a range of grants management activities, including grant application forms, cost principles, audits, and financial reporting. However, training is not one of the issues for which specific government- wide guidance is provided. While many differences exist among grant programs, a basic distinction can be made between two broad grants management roles. The first role is grants management specialist—employees who generally possess detailed knowledge of OMB grants administration requirements, specific agency policies and procedures for grants management, and relevant laws and regulations to help ensure accountability of the grant funds. Grants management specialists are responsible for performing many of the daily grants management tasks from the pre-award phase through closeout. The second role is program specialist—employees who possess expert knowledge in the specific area necessary to meet a grant’s goals. Reflecting the wide variety of federal programs that grants support, individuals performing this role typically possess a specialized program or subject-matter expertise. These specialists can be involved in several stages of the grant process including announcing the terms and conditions of a grant, recommending potential grantees, and monitoring grantees’ progress in achieving the grant’s goals. Although these categories describe separate focus areas and many employees involved with grants concentrate on one or the other, the categories are not mutually exclusive. A single employee can carry out the functions typically associated with both a grants management specialist and a program specialist. Despite the existence of a “grants management specialist” job series, identifying the federal grant workforce presents challenges due to differences in how agencies manage grants and the range of employees involved in grants management. We have previously reported that organizations need to determine the workforce skills necessary to achieve their strategic goals as part of an effective training and development program. However, identifying these skills, as well as the roles, responsibilities, and training needs of individuals in the federal grant workforce at a government-wide level remains a challenge. This is due to the different ways agencies assign grants management responsibilities to grants management specialists and program specialists and the wide range of job series the agencies use. Prior to 2010, no specific job classification existed for the many federal employees responsible for carrying out managerial and administrative tasks related to grants, including ensuring compliance with OMB and agency policies and procedures. In the absence of a specific job classification, officials at selected agencies told us that they classified these employees under a variety of other job series that did not focus on grants, such as general, administrative, and subject-matter job titles. OPM recognized the need for a classification that would more accurately capture the work of federal employees who manage grants, and in November 2010 the agency established a “grants management specialist” (series 1109). Since then, the extent to which agencies have adopted the 1109 job series has varied greatly. As of December 2012, there were 1,414 federal employees in the 1109 series in the 22 grant-making agencies we included in our survey. More than half of these employees worked at HHS. In contrast, 5 of these agencies do not have any series 1109 employees and an additional 7 have fewer than 20 (see figure 1). The way that an agency manages grants may explain whether, and to what extent, it has adopted the grants management specialist job series 1109. In the four agencies we selected for further review, we saw differences in the extent to which they adopted the 1109 series, partly because of different grants management approaches. At HHS, where grants management specialists work alongside program specialists, officials told us that they embraced the 1109 job series. Shortly after OPM introduced the series, HHS began moving hundreds of employees, who were classified in several general or miscellaneous administrative series and whose primary work responsibilities focused on carrying out managerial and administrative tasks, to the new 1109 series. In contrast, both Education and DOT—where program specialists primarily manage grants—largely chose not to use the new series. Officials at these agencies told us that this decision resulted from their grants management approach where program specialists, who have expert subject-matter knowledge in the grant program area, also carry out the functions of grants management specialists. These officials also had concerns about transitioning program specialists such as engineers or educational specialists, who have specific educational requirements, to the 1109 series which has no such requirements. In addition to the 1109 grants management specialist series, the federal grant workforce includes a wide range of employees in other job series, many of whom function as program specialists. These employees generally possess specialized education and expertise in an area directly relevant to the grant’s subject area. For example, at DOT, the employees responsible for managing federal airport safety and improvement grants are typically civil engineers (series 810), who are familiar with airport runway construction standards. Similarly, HHS employs social scientists (series 101) with expertise in child and family services as well as doctors and nurses (series 602 and 610, respectively) to manage and support grants that fund health care and related services to needy families. Some agencies, like DOT, typically rely upon program specialists to carry out both the grants management and program specialist functions, while others, such as HHS, employ individuals whose primary responsibility is to administer daily grants management tasks while working alongside program specialists. With such a diverse range of job series across federal grant-making agencies and given the considerable variation in how agencies assign individuals to grants management roles, it is difficult to identify all the staff responsible for managing federal grants other than on an agency-by- agency basis. We asked the four agencies we focused on in this review— Education, HHS, State, and DOT—to identify the number of employees they considered to be in their grant workforce and provide us with breakdowns by job series. They identified over 5,100 employees, spanning more than 50 different occupational job series. These include grants management specialists, program specialists (e.g., public health program specialists, education program specialists, civil engineers, transportation specialists, and Foreign Service officers), auditors, and financial managers, among others. See figure 2 for a visual representation of the relative frequency of more than 90 percent of these occupational job series. For a complete listing of these job series as well as the total number of employees in each, as identified by Education, HHS, State, and DOT, see appendix III. With the exception of the grants management specialists in the 1109 series, grant officials at each of these four agencies told us that only a subset of those in the 57 job series they identified as part of the grant workforce are actually assigned to work on grants. The program specialists, accountants, contracting officers, and other individuals identified as part of the grant workforce generally comprised a relatively small subset of the total number of agency employees in those associated job series. For instance, while HHS employed over 6,800 doctors as medical officers (series 602) as of December 2012, officials identified only 29 of these as part of the grant workforce. Moreover, for some of the employees identified as being in the grant workforce, working on grants-related activities may only be part of what they do. On a government-wide level, OMB staff told us that they understand that the 1109 series does not encompass the entire federal grant workforce.