this all sounds reasonable. but it could have played out in other ways as well. for instance, Mellon may have come up with the 80 fellowships number based on the amount of money they had ready and available to commit to the project. from there they may have asked IIE to review all fellowships that would have been awarded by DOE (and that fit Mellon's discipline criteria) and to choose 80 for funding. So, IIE needs to take the 130 students nominated by DOE and start narrowing the pool. The first cuts, i imagine, would be any application from a disciplines outside of Mellon's funding priority. okay, that is bound to narrow the pool, but i'm not sure you could narrow it enough this way. so, i guess what i'm saying is that there may be competition between eligible applications.
let's put ourselves in their shoes. you have two weeks to award 80 fellowships, which sounds about like the right number because 3.16 million (from the press release) divided by 80 comes out to about the average fellowship award of $40,000 (from last year's awards). how did Mellon come up with the number 80? they had someone look through the list of nominated students. poli sci got five extra points this year, so there were a disproportionate number of poli sci people compared to previous years. they cut those. then they probably cut economics and sociology. anthropology and geography would be harder to filter -- maybe they just took the whole bunch. they wound up with about 80 people. then they requested those people's applications. now, in my opinion, you aren't going to go back through and re-vet those applications because they have already been vetted. it would be a waste of time and money to do so, and would seem unfair. you probably requested applications mainly for reporting and administrative purposes. you are just going to give awards to those 80 people. if for some reason you wind up with too many (84 or 85 instead of 80), you will probably try to reduce all the grants by a little or come up with another 100k instead of cutting them, but if necessary you might drop off some of the lowest points scores or take a closer look at a couple projects to see if they really fit the Mellon criteria. but in principle, i think if you're project has been asked for by IIE, i think you are more or less slated to be funded. now. in fact, it's just as likely that after you run the totals on your 80 people, you wind up with a number slightly less than 3.16 million...