Grants.gov Mac support questioned

raising the question.

Additionally, if you don't use grants.gov for NSF and instead use their own FastLane service, it works great with a Mac, and you can do everything, whereas some NSF functions are not yet available at grants.gov.

We hear here that even NSF is migrating over to grants.gov during this year. The only "solution" I've heard batted around is Citrix, but I don't know if this is Grumman's solution or our university's.

Frankly, I can't believe this whole thing was allowed in this day and age. Fastlane is still butt-ugly, but they made great strides from only accepting properly formatted PDFs to accepting a ton of document formats with their own post-processing producing uniform output. A standards-compliant browser, on any platform should be all that's required of any government submission/application. What happened to accessibility requirements???

I have had my share of frustration in NSF's "slowlane" but it is FAR superior to this grants.gov crap. I realize that they need to streamline the process, and I agree; however, with the NIS funding only 9% of new applications, this just seems like a filter to try and reduce the number of applications to begin with.

The govt is behaving in its normal racest manner; doesnt suprise me on bit. Citrix is not a mac solution; these agencies should be sued for bias and executives within should be strung up on light poles!! This is criminal activity and should be treated as such; racest bias should not be allowed to persist.

We're a company focused on federal grants management. We do not work for Grants.gov, although our customer's systems interface with them. We have been maintaining a blog discussion about this news and the history of Grants.gov and Macs. You can read all about it at http://blog.tcg.com/tcg/grants_management/index.html.

The bottom line is that Grants.gov made some technology choices several years ago that now require them to move to different (but no less complicated) technologies, e.g. from PureEdge to Adobe Acrobat. There are good reasons behind these events -- the blog has more details -- but I agree that the outcomes are not equitable or ideal.

lmhaffner: The Citrix solution was first proposed by the NIH and then adopted by the Grants.gov project management office (not Grumman). Regarding accessibility requirements: I agree, and so does Grants.gov, which may be one reason why they're moving to Adobe which has a better record in this regard.

Mudmonkey: The government wants to give away all the money it can -- really, it does! This is not a conspiracy to reduce the number of applications. Grants.gov and all federal agencies are actually graded by OMB based largely on how many applications have been funneled through Grants.gov. They have every incentive to make this work well for you and other applicants.

Albert: Accusing Grants.gov of "racest bias" is both inaccurate (in accusation and spelling) and inflammatory. Please try to understand the real issues before accusing anyone of criminal behavior.