A Cooperative Agreement to Evaluate and Compare Federal Formula Grant Programs

The U.S. Federal Transit Administration (FTA) is undertaking efforts to improve its grant award, management and evaluation activities. This report presents the outcomes of a project aimed at assisting the FTA to move in this direction. The objectives of the project are to provide FTA with actionable steps for improving their formula grant programs in terms of the internal processes for developing, approving and administering grants that support providing excellent public transportation service, improve the performance of transit operations and systems, and lead to more fact-based, empirically-framed sets of FTA decisions about its programs and the impacts upon the ultimate recipients of those programs. To meet these objectives, other Federal government agencies' processes for awarding, managing and evaluating comparable grant programs have been reviewed to identify best practices. An assessment of how other Federal domestic formula, project and direct grant programs compare with selected FTA formula grant programs targeted for specific recipients, management processes for grant awarding, on-going oversight, post-award grant management, specific outcomes with respect to achievement of identified milestones and the performance measures used to evaluate grant program outputs and outcomes has been performed. A set of criteria for selecting comparison programs from other Federal government agencies was developed.

• Corporate Authors:

  Center for Advanced Infrastructure and Transportation

  Rutgers University
  100 Brett Road
  Piscataway, NJ  United States  08854-8058

  Federal Transit Administration

  1200 New Jersey Avenue, SE
  Washington, DC  United States  20590
• Authors:
  • Boile, Maria P
  • Theofanis, Sotirios
  • Betak, John
  • O'Connor, Stephen
  • Schneider, David
• Publication Date: 2010-4-30

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Print
• Edition: Final Report
• Features: Appendices; Figures; Tables;
• Pagination: 158p

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Administration; Awards; Evaluation and assessment; Grant aid; Oversight; Public transit
• Identifier Terms: U.S. Federal Transit Administration
• Uncontrolled Terms: Grant selection
• Subject Areas: Administration and Management; Finance; Public Transportation; I10: Economics and Administration;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01354546
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: NJ-26-5010
• Files: TRIS, USDOT
• Created Date: Oct 21 2011 7:38AM