Undrawn vs. uncommitted (HOME/CDBG balances)
When people ask "how much gap funding does this jurisdiction actually have," two different numbers answer it — and only one of them is public.
Federal block-grant money (HOME, CDBG, HTF) moves through a funnel: allocated → obligated → committed → disbursed.
- Allocated: Congress appropriates; HUD announces each grantee's formula share. Annual scale, not a balance.
- Obligated: HUD signs the grant agreement; the money exists on the grantee's Treasury line of credit.
- Committed: the grantee legally attaches funds to a specific project or activity in HUD's IDIS system.
- Disbursed (drawn): cash actually leaves the Treasury as the grantee draws reimbursements.
"Undrawn" = obligated minus disbursed — computable, live, from federal spending data (USASpending, updated monthly by statute). It is the strongest public signal of unspent capacity. But it is not "available": some undrawn money is already committed to projects and merely awaiting construction draws.
"Uncommitted" = obligated minus committed — the true available-to-new-projects figure. It lives only inside IDIS, and HUD stopped publishing the reports that carried it in early 2025. (We have a Freedom of Information Act request pending for the current ledger.)
Practical reading: a jurisdiction with a large undrawn balance and slow historical draw pace has money that must move — the regulatory pressure is real (see CDBG timeliness) even when the committed/uncommitted split is invisible. Honest analysis says "undrawn," never "available," until the commitment ledger is public.