USGS Landslide Hazard Grants FY2027: $1M, a $150K Ceiling, and a New 30-Point Executive Order Test

Nearly a quarter of the score in this year's USGS landslide grant competition has nothing to do with landslides.

The U.S. Geological Survey posted the Cooperative Landslide Hazard Mapping and Assessment Program Announcement for Fiscal Year 2027 (funding opportunity G27AS00381, Assistance Listing 15.821) on November 2. It offers an estimated $1,000,000 for about 10 awards to state, local, Tribal, and territorial governments. On paper it looks like a reissue of the FY2026 round that closed in June. In practice USGS changed three things that decide who wins: it cut the award ceiling by 40 percent, it added a new 30-point scoring criterion for alignment with executive and secretarial orders, and the deadline in the NOFO itself does not match the deadline on the Grants.gov listing.

The program is small. It is also one of the few federal sources that pays state geological surveys and county emergency managers to produce landslide maps, and for many of those offices it is the only source. Here is what changed and how to adjust.

Check the Deadline Yourself

The Grants.gov and Simpler.Grants.gov listings show a close date of February 1, 2027. The NOFO PDF attached to the listing gives a different date. Under "Submission Dates and Times" it says: "Closing Date for Applications: 01/29/2027," with submissions due "no later than 5:00 p.m., ET, on the listed application due date."

February 1, 2027 is a Monday and January 29 is the Friday before it. A single weekend separates the two dates, and the safe reading is obvious: plan to submit by 5:00 p.m. Eastern on Friday, January 29. If USGS corrects the listing or amends the NOFO, you lose nothing by being early. If you plan for the listing date and the NOFO governs, you are out. Send a one-line question to the project officer, Stephen Slaughter (sslaughter@usgs.gov), and keep the written answer in your file.

Grants.gov registration is the other clock. The NOFO tells applicants to "allow 30 days to register in Grants.gov," and only a registered Authorized Organization Representative can submit. A county planning department that has never applied for a federal grant on its own needs to start SAM.gov and Grants.gov setup before Thanksgiving to have comfortable margin.

What the Money Buys, and What It Won't

The program was created by the National Landslide Preparedness Act (P.L. 116-323), signed January 5, 2021, which authorized a national landslide hazards reduction program inside USGS along with grant authority to states, Tribes, and academics. The FY2027 NOFO keeps the four Guidance Criteria, and every proposal must address at least one:

• GC1 — Landslide hazard mapping and assessment. Inventories, susceptibility, runout, exposure, and risk modeling; landslide event databases; loss data collection; land-use influence studies. USGS "strongly" encourages lidar-derived DEMs such as 3DEP data, and any mapping proposal must include a map of the area and its size in square miles.
• GC2 — Planning and coordination. Emergency and technical response protocols, landslide working groups, and links between hazard scientists and the agencies that issue watches and warnings.
• GC3 — Education, engagement, and outreach. Public materials, practitioner workshops, curricula for utility workers and planners, and user testing of existing landslide products.
• GC4 — Landslide hazards in Alaska. Geospatial products that communicate hazard to the public and first responders, and strategies for communicating forecast uncertainty, including landslide-generated tsunami risk on steep coastlines and large lakes.

The exclusions matter as much as the topics. The NOFO will not pay for long-term operation of monitoring networks or instruments, projects that "principally involve the direct procurement of a product or equipment," capital repairs to landslide-damaged infrastructure, mitigation design, construction, land acquisition, or pre-award costs. A public works department hoping to fix a failed road embankment needs FEMA hazard mitigation money, not this program. A department that wants to know where the next embankment will fail is the target applicant.

Eligibility is government-only: state, county, city or township, special district, and federally recognized Tribal governments. A university can apply on behalf of a state geological survey only if that survey is organized inside the university system, which is the arrangement in states like Kentucky, Kansas, and Illinois. Other universities, nonprofits, and consultants can participate only as subrecipients.

A Smaller Ceiling Changes the Math

The FY2026 announcement (G26AS00010) offered the same $1,000,000 and the same 10 expected awards, but with an award ceiling of $250,000. FY2027 drops the ceiling to $150,000. The floor stays at $10,000.

The total pool did not move, so the change looks aimed at spreading the money. A $250,000 regional mapping proposal could absorb a quarter of the national program by itself, while ten awards at the new ceiling would cost $1.5 million, half again more than the pool. The average award is still going to land near $100,000. Proposals that come in under the ceiling, with a defined area in square miles and a per-square-mile cost the panel can check, will have an easier time on the 25-point "Appropriateness and Reasonableness of the Budget" criterion.

Projects can run one or two years. FY2027 projects must start between May 1 and September 30, 2027, and the start date you request becomes your official start date and cannot be changed afterward. The NOFO estimates an end date of April 30, 2029 for two-year projects. Pick a start date your field season can actually meet; for high-elevation or Alaska mapping, a May start buys you a full summer.

Two smaller budget rules trip up first-time applicants. Conference and workshop travel is capped at $6,000 and is limited to staff. Applicants without a negotiated indirect rate may use the de minimis rate of up to 15 percent of modified total direct costs under 2 CFR 200.414(f), and anyone with a negotiated rate must attach the agreement.

The New 30 Points

The FY2026 NOFO scored proposals on "four equally weighted evaluation criteria": technical merit, societal benefits, team experience, and budget reasonableness. The FY2027 version keeps those four at 25 points each and adds a fifth, worth more than any of them:

"EO/SO Alignment" assesses how well the project addresses the executive orders and secretary's orders named in the NOFO's executive summary. Those are Executive Order 14303 (Restoring Gold Standard Science), Executive Order 14239 (Achieving Efficiency Through State and Local Preparedness), and Executive Order 14308 (Empowering Commonsense Wildfire Prevention and Response). The FY2026 NOFO listed six directives in its federal-priorities section, including EO 14313 and two Interior secretarial orders, but did not score them. FY2027 lists three and makes them worth 30 of 130 points, about 23 percent of the total.

This is the most important change in the announcement, and it is easy to address honestly because the three orders line up with what landslide work already does:

• EO 14303 (Gold Standard Science). The NOFO ties this to "rigorous scientific methods, transparent data management, and evidence-based decision-making." Name your mapping protocol, describe your uncertainty treatment, and commit to releasing data in a public, documented format.
• EO 14239 (State and Local Preparedness). Show which local emergency managers, planners, or transportation agencies will use the product and how it enters their hazard mitigation plan. Letters of commitment help here.
• EO 14308 (Wildfire). The NOFO explicitly mentions "post-wildfire landslide hazards, debris flows, and slope instability." If your project area has burn scars, say so in the first paragraph. Post-fire debris-flow susceptibility mapping is the cleanest overlap in the whole program.

Give this criterion its own labeled section in the 15-page Project Narrative, with one paragraph per order. Reviewers can't award points they have to hunt for.

Separately, the NOFO requires every applicant to certify compliance with all current executive and secretary's orders, naming the DEI executive order and the Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History order specifically. Outreach language that would have been routine two years ago, such as targeting specific demographic groups, deserves a second read before submission.

Cost Share as a Tiebreaker

Cost share is not required and the review panel does not score it. But the Landslide Preparedness Act directs USGS to prioritize projects where at least 50 percent of total project cost comes from non-federal sources, and the program office applies that after peer review. The NOFO's example: if two proposals score the same and only one meets the 50-percent threshold, that one is ranked higher. Anything below 50 percent counts as no match at all.

That makes the threshold all-or-nothing. A 30 percent match earns nothing, so either reach 50 percent or skip it. Match can include third-party in-kind contributions and existing datasets. Lidar or geophysical data qualifies only if no federal funds were used to collect it, its cost is pro-rated to the mapped area, and it has not been used as match before. State-funded lidar acquisitions are often the easiest way for a state survey to reach 50 percent.

One last caution for repeat applicants: the program office "may limit the amount of available funding or the number of awarded projects to organizations with outstanding NCEs." An open no-cost extension on a prior USGS landslide award can count against you, so close out old awards before January.

Landslide offices are usually small, and a $1 million national pool means each proposal has to be sharp on the first try. Granted can help you map a mapping project onto the five criteria and draft the narrative well before the January 29 deadline.