Federal grants and cooperative agreements were catalogued for decades in the Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance, the CFDA, and every programme had a five-digit CFDA number such as 66.510 for the Environmental Protection Agency’s research programmes. Many organisations built searchable feeds on those numbers. In 2018 the catalog was folded into SAM.gov and renamed Assistance Listings; the numbers stayed the same, so an old CFDA number still finds the programme.
The two systems
Assistance Listings describe programmes: what an agency funds, who is eligible, how much money exists. Grants.gov lists the actual funding opportunities, each with a deadline and an application package. The usual workflow is to identify programmes in the Assistance Listings and then set up saved searches on Grants.gov by agency, category, eligibility and keyword. Grants.gov also handles submission for most agencies, although the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and a few others route applicants through their own portals after the initial step.
Registration
Institutions must have an active SAM.gov registration with a Unique Entity ID before they can apply. Universities and hospitals keep this current through their research offices; small non-profits and firms often discover the requirement too late, and registration can take weeks. Individual researchers register with the agency systems, for example eRA Commons for NIH or Research.gov for NSF.
Research funding specifically
For research and technology development the largest programmes are NIH, NSF, the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, DARPA and the other defence research agencies, USDA’s NIFA and NASA. The Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programmes are the main route for firms; their solicitations appear on SBIR.gov as well as Grants.gov. Amounts, deadlines and priorities change with each federal budget, so the Grants.gov e-mail alerts are worth more than any static listing.
This site is an independent publication and is not affiliated with any federal agency or with a former technology-transfer center of the same name.
