Apparently FLI doesn’t usually issue letters of intent at all, but the grantee requested it in this case.
Separate from the letter, there’s a question of whether more vetting should occur at an earlier stage of FLI’s process — either to save time and effort on FLI’s part, or to avoid sending a bunch of grantees informal emails that get their hopes up, or because the overall amount of vetting in the process might be too low (even though in principle it could be that FLI is doing normal levels of vetting and just spacing it out weirdly).
Apparently FLI doesn’t usually issue letters of intent at all, but the grantee requested it in this case.
Separate from the letter, there’s a question of whether more vetting should occur at an earlier stage of FLI’s process — either to save time and effort on FLI’s part, or to avoid sending a bunch of grantees informal emails that get their hopes up, or because the overall amount of vetting in the process might be too low (even though in principle it could be that FLI is doing normal levels of vetting and just spacing it out weirdly).