Jim McKay, Blake Willson Group’s Financial and Grants Management Service Line Leader, fully endorses the position of Michael Peckham as expressed in his “Federal Grants Management Certification (FGMC): A Concept Paper,” and offers the following commentary.
The General Accountability Office (GAO) has issued at least five reports on the abysmal state of workforce development and lack of education in the grants management profession[1]. Michael has expanded upon the “Roadmap” on which we previously collaborated to address these issues. OMB has repeatedly over the years deferred to OPM and HHS when it comes to workforce development. To date, HHS has not acted. The OPM competency model (2009) was recently updated through the Federal Workforce Competency Initiative (2023). Improvements have been made and more remains to be done to maintain defensible scientific rigor as a foundation for training, evaluation, and promotion. It needs to tell managers what staff need to know, when they need to know it, the experience needed at each step of their career progression, and be measurable so performance may be evaluated. To that end, OPM will launch its April 27, 2026
Federal Workforce Competency Initiative Survey to perform a deep dive into a technical competency framework for grants managers.[2] It will need to be kept up to date with future changes to the Uniform Guidance (2 CFR 200), e.g. OMB’s current proposed revisions[3], and include elements of project and performance management/measurement, IT, cybersecurity, and artificial intelligence. The competency model will be the foundation for developing the suggested comprehensive curriculum of grants management and related courses having three part learning objectives.[4] A resulting certification should meet ICE 1100[5], which meets ANSI standards ensuring the certification program follows nationally recognized, rigorous, and independently validated standards. This gives the credential credibility, consistency, fairness, and defensibility—key factors for public trust and industry acceptance.
To update and paraphrase a pre-COVID-19 quote, “Now, trillions of dollars are being managed by some who may lack the required underpinnings.”[6] This is not to say that there aren’t highly competent grant managers working in the field. However, all one has to do to prove the point is to try to hire a competent grants manager at the federal, recipient, or industry level. Without the foundation Mike describes, finding successful candidates depends on where they got their experience and training, and whether or not they had an excellent manager/mentor, e.g. staff coming out of agencies like the Office of Justice Programs with its Regional Financial Management Training are highly sought after. Otherwise, hiring success is hit or miss, mostly miss. You would want a CPA to work on your taxes or financial statements, and an acquisitions professional to work on your contracts. Why should grants management be any different especially given the dollars at risk? The multi-level certification process described by Mr. Peckham will solve this challenge.
The roadmap: anyone across the government who “touches” grant funded operations (grant administrators and program staff like FEMA program experts, social services experts, researchers, law enforcement, etc.) must take the training and obtain a basic certification. Elective courses for specific areas such as research, transportation, housing, etc. can be created to nullify the turf argument, “but we’re different.” Michael’s approach will create a new higher-level experiential certification that could be managed by a professional association such as AGA which has re-branded to cover multiple competencies beyond financial management, such as project management, performance management, and information technology.
The ultimate goal would be to open up the training to recipient organizations and not allow them to receive grant funding unless they employ a certain number of certified staff. A rough estimate would place this number at approximately 2 million people globally. This would have an ancillary benefit of creating a high-quality professional job series in the very communities that need meaningful jobs the most.
At the core of the multibillion-dollar fraud we have seen, is the lack of education and certification (which includes an ethics component) and lack of federal monitoring and prime-awardee subrecipient monitoring conducted by expert staff. The time to act is now.
Jim McKay is a former Inspector General who later served as the Deputy Comptroller of the Office of Justice Programs. He developed and led the financial infrastructure supporting OJP’s $30B active award portfolio which included his Federal Best Practice Monitoring Program later adopted and adapted by the National Science Foundation. He is the co-author of the 2018 NGMA Grants Management Body of Knowledge (GMBOK) Guide, recipient of NGMA’s Newton Award for career long contributions to the industry, led AGA’s two national surveys on grants management, and currently leads BWG’s grants management practice. He is in his 47th year of service to the government.
[1] GAO-12-360 (2012)
Title: Grants Workforce: Federal Agencies’ Implementation of Grants Workforce Training Requirements
Key Criticism: Found significant inconsistency in training, lack of standardized competencies, and agencies not adequately evaluating training effectiveness.
GAO-14-539 (2014)
Title: Managing Grants: Agencies Need to Strengthen Oversight and Better Assess Training Needs for Their Grant-Making Workforce
Key Criticism: Highlighted that agencies lacked methods to determine workforce skill requirements, identified widespread gaps in grants management knowledge, and criticized absence of coordinated training approaches.
GAO-19-217 (2019)
Title: Federal Grants Management: Selected Agencies Have Not Fully Developed Plans to Meet Requirements for Grants Workforce Training and Certification
Key Criticism:
Found agencies were not implementing grants workforce certification requirements, lacked standardized competencies, and were not evaluating workforce capacity.
GAO-21-318 (2021)
Title: Federal Grants Workforce: OMB and Agencies Need to Address Gaps to Meet Federal Requirements
Key Criticism: Stated that federal agencies still had not established required grants management workforce training and certification processes, despite earlier OMB requirements. Noted persistent skill gaps, inconsistent training, and lack of a unified professional standard.
[2] OPM Memorandum, April 27, 2026, Federal Workforce Competency Initiative Survey
[3] Federal Register – Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance, May 29, 2026
GAO-25-107315 (2025)
Title: Grants Management: Recent Guidance Could Enhance Subaward Oversight
Focuses on subaward oversight, it is part of GAO’s broader body of work on federal grants management, which has long highlighted capacity gaps, training deficiencies, and competency issues among grant recipients and agencies. The report builds on earlier findings that many organizations lack the skills and resources to effectively manage and report on complex grant requirements, including subawards.
[4] Mager, R. F. (1997). Preparing Instructional Objectives – Clear three‑part objectives are important because they:
• Focus the training — they define exactly what skills or knowledge the session must deliver.
• Ensure alignment — content, exercises, and assessments all tie back to the objective.
• Make learning measurable — with observable behaviors, you can tell whether participants actually achieved the objective.
• Improve evaluation — they make it possible to assess training effectiveness and identify gaps.
• Support adult‑learning principles — adults learn best when the goals are explicit and practical.
[5] Institute for Credentialing Excellence: ICE 1100 is the benchmark for assessment-based certificate programs. It covers key areas such as governance, psychometrically sound exam development, fairness, security, and ongoing program evaluation to ensure credentials are valid, reliable, and defensible.
[6] AGA Accountability Talks Podcast, December 14, 2019. Episode 40: AGA Grants Survey
