Expert advice for every grant — from EPA to DARPA

Humanity AI — backed by Ford, Mellon, MacArthur, Doris Duke, Lumina, Kapor, Mozilla, Omidyar, Packard, and Siegel — announced $8 million to 12 inaugural grantees and reserved $10 million for a summer 2026 open call. The collaboration signals a new model for foundation funding in the AI era. Here is what the inaugural cohort tells you about the summer call, and how to position your organization to compete.

NSF 25-540 puts $30 million into roughly 29 awards across three tracks — TTP-E at $600K, TTP-T at $1.2M, TTP-P at $2M. Each demands a different posture on partnerships, prior NSF funding, and the mandatory $50,000 I-Corps Teams allocation. The May 19, 2026 deadline is a forcing function that strips ambiguity out of every PI's translation story.

The National Science Foundation announced $1.5 billion over a decade for X-Labs — milestone-based, Other Transactions Authority awards built around independent teams of researchers, engineers, and entrepreneurs. The first two topics target quantum-enabled imaging and quantum interconnects. Here is what the new mechanism means for traditional grantees and what the first round actually demands.

USDA Rural Development released $17 million in Community Connect grants for unserved rural communities (10/1 Mbps threshold) and $27 million in Distance Learning and Telemedicine grants for places under 20,000 residents. Deadlines are June 29 and 30, 2026. Here is how to read the eligibility rules, which applicants actually clear them, and what the FY2026 round signals about USDA broadband priorities.

Western SARE's 2026 Research & Education grant cycle uses a pre-proposal gate before full proposals are invited. The June 15 deadline determines who gets to compete for up to $350,000 over three years — and the pre-proposal is graded on different criteria than the full proposal. Here's what that asymmetry means for sustainable-ag teams across thirteen Western states and four territories.

The FTA's FY2026 Pilot Program for Transit-Oriented Development Planning published in the Federal Register on May 11 makes $28,492,618 available with a July 10 deadline — but eligibility is restricted to existing FTA grantees, applicants must either sponsor an eligible fixed-guideway capital project or hold land-use planning authority in its corridor, and a documented partnership between the two is required. The eligibility architecture, not the funding amount, defines the universe of viable applicants.

NASA released a Broad Agency Announcement on April 17, 2026, that replaces the agency's traditional annual SBIR/STTR solicitation cycle with a phased-appendix model valid through September 30, 2027. Appendix A and Appendix B opened April 21 with a May 21 deadline; additional appendices will release throughout the BAA period. The shift breaks the once-a-year proposal cadence small businesses have planned around since the program's founding and demands a different operational posture.

The SBA's new $50M Empower to Grow (E2G) manufacturing grant initiative announced May 6 funds only 10 awards of $5M each, restricts applicants to organizations with three years of continuous operation and documented hands-on manufacturing training capacity, and pairs the grant program with a 90 percent Made in America loan guarantee. The eligibility floor — not the funding ceiling — is the operative constraint.

The Competitive Grants for State Assessments FY2026 competition — innovative assessment item types and meaningful learning opportunities as absolute priorities, three competitive preference priorities, two invitational priorities, and a June 16 deadline — reshapes the operational definition of what state assessment systems are expected to do. Notice published May 5, applicant webinar held May 11.

The Department of Education's reimagined Comprehensive Centers Program competition — $46M total, National plus Regional plus Content Centers, field-initiated priorities, June 30 deadline — restructures how technical assistance reaches state education agencies. Intent to apply due May 29.

DARPA pre-released four FY26 SBIR topics on April 30 — SWiFT field transfusion, BARK K-9 therapeutics, EXPOSITION finger regeneration, and PEPI photonic-electronic integration. Phase I awards range $150K-$300K, with Direct-to-Phase-II up to $1.8M. Closing June 3.

Ten foundations pooled $500M for a five-year people-centered AI initiative. The first $18M tranche — $8M to 12 inaugural grantees at $500K each, $3M to AI Civics, $10M open call this summer — locks in the doctrinal frame nonprofits will need to fit.

USDA Rural Development's FY2026 Rural Business Development Grants NOFO published May 15 — Opportunity grants capped at 10 percent of annual funding, Enterprise grants for small and emerging rural businesses, awards obligated by July 31, and applications routed through state offices on locally-set deadlines. The state-office routing is the operational detail that decides who gets funded.

The Water Research Foundation's RFP 5394 — up to $200,000 to evaluate GenAI and Agentic AI scalability across at least six water and wastewater utilities, NIST AI RMF integration required, proposals due 3 p.m. Mountain Time on May 20 — is the first major sector-utility-funded AI research initiative to bake risk-management framework compliance into the work statement. Four days remain.

DOE's FY2026 University Nuclear Research Infrastructure Revitalization NOFO closed May 13 with a single multi-year consortium award above $6M. The structure signals where federal nuclear R&D is heading and how universities should organize for FY27.

HRSA's FY2026 Rural Residency Planning and Development Program closes today. Fourteen awards of up to $750,000 over three years to launch new rural residencies in six specialties. The economics, the eligibility, and what FY27 applicants need to know.

NSF 26-200 quietly rewrote the merit review process effective December 15, 2025 — minimum reviews dropped from three to two, panels became optional, and program officer discretion expanded substantially. Combined with 1,752 grant terminations and a constrained $8.75B FY2026 budget, the funding calculus has shifted. Here's how to adapt.

NSF's TechAccess: AI-Ready America program commits roughly $168M over three years to 56 State/Territory Coordination Hubs at $1M/year each, with a Letter of Intent due June 16, 2026 and the first 10 full proposals due July 16. Here's the eligibility, strategy, and political context every prospective hub needs.

The FY2026 Uniform Guidance changes raised the Single Audit threshold from $750K to $1M and rewrote procurement, equipment, and subrecipient monitoring expectations — but the bigger story is the new enforcement posture making federal funding a fundamentally different risk profile for nonprofits, universities, and state/local governments. Here's what changed and how to adapt.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's From Insight to Action call — $8M total, twenty $500K awards, two-year community-partnership requirement — closed letters of intent May 14. The structural shift in how RWJF will fund health equity research through 2028.

ARPA-H's Intelligent Generator of Research program plans roughly three Other Transaction agreements covering four technical areas over five years, with solution summaries due June 25 and full proposals August 6. The structure rewards multi-institution consortia that can deliver a closed-loop AI research ecosystem — not labs proposing isolated tools.

The EDA's May 11 NOFO will award 5-8 grants of $1M-$8M for AI workforce training — but only to employer-led sectoral partnerships, not standalone training providers. With a 60% federal cap and a 24-36 month performance period, the design favors regional coalitions over universities. Here is how to assemble a winning application.

Humanity AI — a five-year, $500 million coalition co-chaired by Omidyar Network and MacArthur — released its first $18M of grants on May 12. Twelve organizations received $500K each; a $10M open call launches this summer. Here is the coalition's theory of change, who got funded, and how to position for the open call.

NASA released its 2026–2027 SBIR/STTR Broad Agency Announcement on April 17, with Appendix 2026A/B Phase I submissions closing May 21 at 5pm ET. Phase I awards rose 50% to $225K, Phase II to $1.275M, and the BAA replaces the old annual solicitation with continuous appendix releases. Here is what the structural shift means for small-business strategy.

Starting May 25, 2026, NIH will reject new proposals unless every covered individual has completed compliant research security training within the prior 12 months. NSF, USDA, DOE, and DOD enforce the same rule. Here is what the CHIPS Act actually requires, who counts as a covered individual, and the one-hour module that satisfies all five agencies.

Schmidt Sciences' 2026 Science of Trustworthy AI RFP closes May 17 with two funding tiers — up to $1M (Tier 1) and $1–5M+ (Tier 2) over 1–3 years, with a 10% indirect cost cap. The three research aims target misalignment under distribution shift, predictive-validity evaluations, and oversight of superhuman systems. Here is why the structure favors team-based proposals.

The Department of Education's FY2026 Comprehensive Centers Program competition, published in the Federal Register on May 8, restructures a 60-year-old technical assistance program around state-defined priorities. The headline change is the joint board with the Regional Educational Laboratories. The under-discussed change is the field-initiated content center category — and it is the most consequential opening for issue-specific organizations in a decade.

On June 3, 2026, four DARPA Biological Technologies Office SBIR topics close simultaneously — SWiFT, BARK, EXPOSITION, and Medical Swarm Robotics. Combined Phase I plus Phase II potential exceeds $6 million per company, and together they sketch a coherent strategy of distributed, autonomous, dual-species combat casualty care that depends on small businesses, not primes, to actually build.

Federal grants move $1.2 trillion a year — roughly 20 percent of all federal spending and more than the entire rest of the appropriations budget combined. After 140,000 federal RIFs and a wave of False Claims Act enforcement, the system that distributes one-fifth of all federal dollars is operating on a thinning bench of trained grants personnel. The Council on Federal Financial Assistance is racing to standardize Notices of Funding Opportunity, but reform is moving slower than attrition.

The HHS Grants Policy Statement that took effect October 1, 2025 raised the micro-purchase threshold to $50,000, the single audit threshold to $1 million, and the de minimis indirect cost rate to 15 percent — quietly rewriting the operational rules for tens of billions of dollars in annual awards. Combined with full 2 CFR Parts 200 and 300 adoption and new MAHA-aligned program priorities, it is the biggest compliance shift for health grantees since Uniform Guidance arrived in 2013.

NSF's December 2025 merit review changes look procedural — two outside reviews instead of three, optional panels, three-to-five-sentence summaries. The deeper shift is the transfer of decision authority from external peer reviewers to a smaller cohort of program officers, and it will reshape how every proposal needs to be written.

The Strategic Breakthrough Awards mechanism authorized in the February 2026 SBIR reauthorization is the first post-Phase II funding instrument in program history. The mandatory 100 percent private match and the four-year performance window reposition SBIR from research subsidy to commercialization accelerator — and small businesses that do not understand that pivot will fail to compete for the first solicitations in Q4.

ARPA-H's new Intelligent Generator of Research program turns the classic biomedical pipeline on its head — an AI system proposes the next experiment, robotic labs run it, and mechanistic models of chronic disease get rebuilt from the resulting evidence. The funding call asks teams to compete across four loosely coupled technical layers that have never been delivered together.

DARPA's ALIAS Missionized Autonomy for Emergency Services topic closes May 13, 2026 — and the choice to use an SBIR XL designation to fund civilian wildfire autonomy through a defense procurement is the most consequential signal about where federal dual-use funding is heading in 2026.

NASA's 2026 SBIR/STTR program drops the January Mainline solicitation in favor of a rolling Broad Agency Announcement that runs through September 2027. Appendix A and B are live, Appendix B closes May 21, and the proposal-cap arithmetic that has governed NASA small business strategy for two decades just changed.

A former 22-year NIH program officer found 205 of 336 listed funding forecasts had blown past their promised posting dates with no announcement ever published. Combined with a 54 percent year-over-year drop in competitive awards, the picture is of a science funding shutdown executed through bureaucratic delay rather than budget cuts.