Well, if you allow leniency on the format you're basically letting some students insert more content than others. If my essay has 4 four lines per inch and yours has 3, I'm getting more words per page, which makes it unfair for all other applicants.
Also, "apply some common sense, people!" is the dumbest reasoning you can ever have when dealing with law, especially law that grants people money.
Except it was a college administrator that failed, not students.
I don't see how that affects my point. Just replace "students" with "administrators".
1. A word count is likely part of it, thus your argument is irrelevant since more words would fail you anyway, formatting being irrelevant.
2. Formatting is not so you have precise word count. Part of it is legebility. Most of it, like all rules of grants, is to deny them.
Normally, when you have to award a grant but have limited funds, you make up rules to use in deciding between two equally valid groups.
However, if an organization has been doing the grant for decades, does it make sense that suddenly they'd be denied? Unless there was a sudden surge of exceptional programs that forced the department to cut out a very successful one with decades of history, this screams funding cuts.
As I said, the formatting rules are for deciding between close competitors. And it wasn't just one organization awarded either. So call me paranoid but this looks exactly like a "deny any you can with any technicality".
But we won't know until we get the award list. But I am sure either not all the money was given out or it was given to new programs that are more in line with DeVos's ideology.