With this limited information, I'm going to offer 2 ideas:
1. The NFP is the one giving the grant. Example: an NFP, The National Foundation to Ban Spaghetti, gives a grant to the Kids Against Spaghetti to fund anti-spaghetti protests)
2. The NFP receives a grant which is restricted to a specific purpose and which is required to be expended in that fiscal period for that purpose. Example: an NFP, The National Foundation to Ban Spaghetti, receives a grant to run ads during the political campaigns in 2016. They're on a calendar year fiscal period, so the whole $120,000 grant must be expended during 2016, so they consider the grant to represent both an anticipated income and expense of equal amounts.
Scenario 1 is the only one that the grant itself would be an expense; however, in Scenario 2, the presence of the grant would still indicate expenses to come. So, on a financial statement, Scenario 1 would list a grant as an expense; in the budgeting phase, for Scenario 2, if I'm going to include the grant as income then I also need to include a matching expense.
If neither of these really explain, then give me some more info about what/where you found and I can see if I can explain the specific situation you ran into. I work in a NFP and we work quite a bit with grants, so hopefully I can help out more when I know what the specific situation is. 🙂