EA Funds hands out money very infrequently—should we be worried?

From the EA Funds website, here is the amount of money unallocated in each fund:

  • Long-Term Future: $348,167

  • Global Development: $497,957

  • Animal Welfare: $75,109

  • EA Community: $206,271

Some of them haven’t disbursed any funds in quite a while. I asked the CEA team about this and got the following reply:

The answer to this is that currently the fund manager have a great deal of discretion about when they give out grants, and they tend to do so in large chunks with somewhat low frequency. This is a situation we may be giving more consideration in the future, because indeed there are reasons to question whether the granting frequency as it currently is an optimal situation.

It seems problematic to have ~$1.1million dollars in the bank and no commitment as to when this will be handed out.

For the Animal Welfare fund, I mind less – the fund manager makes many small donations to a bunch of charities, and it seems unlikely I’d ever be able to match his skill in doing this. But in the case of the Global Development fund (which so far has mostly just handed money to AMF and has half a million dollars in the pot), I could just pay my monthly donation into a low-risk ETF, make a small yield on it, and then donate the total myself at the end of the year.

Interested to hear people’s thoughts on this!