DEPARTMENT PROFILE
This is the only work your department does. Everything after it — the monitoring, the matching, the deadlines — happens on our side. Answer what you know; anything you're unsure of can be left blank and corrected later.
BEFORE YOU START
Five things worth having in front of you.
Nothing here requires research. If a number isn't handy, estimate it — we'd rather have your best guess than an empty field, and you can correct anything later. Where a question exists because a specific program turns on the answer, we've said so.
01
Your staffing numbers
Budgeted sworn positions, how many are actually filled, and civilian staff. Actual sworn count is the one that sizes awards — federal hiring requests are capped as a share of your real force, so a department of 30 and a department of 60 are working with different ceilings on the same program.
02
Whether any vacancies are unfunded
This is the distinction that trips departments up. Federal hiring money can't backfill a position your budget already covers — the rule is that funded positions don't qualify, and an unfunded or eliminated position may. If you've lost positions in a budget cycle, that's worth flagging. It's often the difference between eligible and not.
03
Your fiscal year, and whether you can match
When your budget year starts and roughly what you run on. Then the harder one: if a program required local match, could you come up with it? On the big hiring programs that match has to be real cash. Not vehicles you already own, not time your staff already spends. It starts at a quarter of the cost and climbs from there. If the answer is no, say no. We'd rather drop those programs out of your brief than send you something your council will never sign off on. Plenty of what we find doesn't ask for match at all.
04
How old your equipment is
Cameras, vests, cars, radios, records system. Ballpark years are fine, nobody's auditing this. Of all five sections, this one pays off most often. Gear aging out is usually what makes a department eligible for something nobody told them about.
05
The three things you'd fund first
If the money showed up tomorrow, where does it go? Answer that and your brief gets shorter. Anything outside those three has to clear a much higher bar before we'll send it to you.
One question catches people off guard. In the equipment section we ask whether you have a written mandatory-wear policy for body armor. Looks like a compliance box. It isn't. The federal vest reimbursement program won't let an agency touch the money without that certification on file, so a one-word answer decides whether one of the easiest programs out there is open to you. Don't have one? Fixable, and we'll walk you through it.