Assistance program
Part 1774 Special Evaluation Assistance for Rural Communities and Households (SEARCH)
$12.9 Million committed in FY2018–FY2026
- Agency
- Rural Utilities Service, Agriculture, Department of
- Assistance
- Project Grants
- CFDA number
- 10.759
- What it does
- To make predevelopment planning grants for feasibility studies, design assistance, and technical assistance to financially distressed communities in rural areas with populations of 2,500 or fewer inhabitants for water and waste disposal projects.
- Who benefits
- Beneficiaries are the entities or organizations eligible to develop projects under the Water and Waste Disposal Loan and Grant Program. Eligible entities include (1) public bodies or governmental entities such as municipalities, counties, districts, authorities, and other political subdivisions of a State, (2) nonprofit organizations such as associations, cooperatives, and private nonprofit corporations, (3) Native American Indian tribes on Federal and State reservations and other federally recognized Indian tribes.
- Who applies
- Applicants must be (1) public bodies or governmental entities such as states, municipalities, counties, districts, authorities, and other political subdivisions of a State; (2) nonprofit organizations such as associations, cooperatives, private nonprofit corporations, and institutions of higher education and hospitals; or, (3) Native American Indian tribes on Federal and State reservations, other federally recognized Indian tribes, and Native American Organizations (includes Indian groups, cooperatives, corporations, partnerships, and associations. Applicants must demonstrate that they are financially distressed and unable to fund the project through their own means.
- Authorized by
- 7 U.S.C. § 1926(a)(2)
Committed by fiscal year
* FY2026 is year-to-date — the fiscal year is still in progress, so its total is still filling in. The striped band and dashed line mark that provisional stretch.
Top recipients
By dollars committed.
How to read these numbers
- Committed through this program
Money committed under this assistance listing (its CFDA program), counted in the year each action happened.
- How it's paid
Most programs pay out one way — a grant, or a direct payment to individuals; the flow bar only appears when a program genuinely mixes types.
- Some recipients aren't itemized
For entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare, the government reports one aggregate instead of naming tens of millions of people, so the recipient roster isn't part of the public record.
- Awards, counted once
An award count is the number of distinct awards with at least one action that year — each counted once, however many times it was amended.
- The colored bars
Every bar on this page splits by how the money moves:
Direct payments