State and federal grant application processes remain overly burdensome, competitive, and inflexible—disadvantaging under-resourced communities and small local governments. Time-intensive applications, duplicative reporting, inconsistent program rules, and high local match requirements overwhelm limited staff capacity and make it extremely difficult to stack or braid funding sources. Applicants often invest significant time and money into complex, low-success-rate applications, diverting scarce resources away from implementation and reinforcing inequities between well-staffed agencies and smaller jurisdictions or CBOs.