Are all applicants honest?

You will never know. However is does not exempt you from telling the truth. You should of course follow the same ethics for your proposal as you do for your ordinary research.

For two reasons:

In cheating you steal research money from your colleagues
If you get the money you will probably run into problems when you are going to implement the project for reasons like
- You did not have all the competence you promised
- You did not have all date or results you promised
- You deliberately underestimated the work in the proposal
- You did not have all the support resources you wrote into the proposal
- Etc etc

Running a project based on a cheating proposal will never succeed.

In particular you should be 100% correct and honest with:

CVs
Previous research
Preliminary results
Access to external support and resources

However writing a proposal is not like writing a scientific article so you can do:

Write in a more sales oriented style selling your idea
Give an optimistic and powerful description of impact

Impact is what is going to happen in the future based on your results. So you should give an enthusiastic description of the use and exploitation of your results. Your research is high risk - high gain. Given success you will produce high gain and that you should describe.

You should be particularly careful if you let consultants write your proposal:

You are still 100% responsible for the proposal text
Consultants will probably not have the full scientific in depth knowledge an may not be able to see pitfalls and wholes in your knowledge and data
Consultants are not going to run the project. They may be overoptimistic about achievements and results. Be careful with what you promise to do

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