The federal government just wasn't ready for the demands placed on Grants.gov, the federal government's online grants portal. Since December 2008, the site has seen a doubling of applications. In the second week in March, more than 8,000 applications were filed. On at least two days that week, more than 2,000 users were on the site, not far from its 3,000-user limit; it was buckling under the weight of all these applications.

In early March, the Office of Management and Budget urged agencies to come up with alternative methods of receiving grant applications, while the Department of Health and Human Services, which runs the site, figured out a solution. HHS plans to add servers, bandwidth and storage to handle more visitors at any time. But all of this will take time; in the meantime, where are grant applicants to go?

Federal agencies now are scrambling to figure out how to handle grant applications after they were notified that Grants.gov had become too top-heavy. In some cases, agencies are turning to regular mail, fax, email and their own online systems to receive applications.

It's a dicey situation right now especially since Grants.gov has been trumpeted by the Obama administration as a good place to go to get funding for projects under the stimulus package. I'm sure there will be a solution coming, I'm just not sure when.

For more on Grants.gov:
- check out this Federal Times article