Congress is most focused now on the threat of a shutdown next week if lawmakers cannot reach an agreement before DHS’s stopgap continuing resolution runs out on Feb. 27. But lost in this discussion is how much the past five months have already disrupted the department’s annual grant process, which is worth $1.6 billion to state and local governments writing their own budgets this summer.
That’s because a continuing resolution is just that: a temporary fix to “continue” operations as they were before Oct. 1, the beginning of the current 2015 fiscal year. New grant applications for 2015 count as new starts, which are not authorized at this stage.
