Supplanting

In detail

The test is counterfactual, which is what makes it hard: would the activity have been funded anyway? An organisation that moves an existing salary onto a grant and frees the old money for something else has usually supplanted, even where every line item is allowable taken on its own.

Non-supplanting clauses are common in federal education, justice and public-safety programmes, and they arrive as a paragraph rather than as a checkbox. Some carry a documentation requirement on top: the recipient has to be able to show what the prior year’s spending actually was.

Against unallowable costs

An unallowable cost is a category the programme will not pay for at all. Supplanting is a perfectly allowable cost being used to replace funding that already existed. A budget can be made entirely of allowable costs and still be a supplanting budget, which is why the two are not one field with two values.

How GrantTrove stores it

• What we extract are spending categories: `use_of_funds`, shown on a record under “What can the money be used for?”. They say what money may be spent on. None of them says whether it may replace money already committed, and we do not convert a prose prohibition into a flag.
• Where that field is empty the record prints Not stated rather than an empty list — an empty list reads as “no restrictions”, which is a claim no notice made. The same section says outright that a line-item cost table, where a programme publishes one, is not parsed for the record.

Common questions