Research Grants to Rigorously Evaluate Innovative and Promising Approaches to Prevent Firearm-Related Violence and Injuries

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has put academic principal investigators on notice: RFA-CE-27-014, forecast on Grants.gov on July 9, will commit an estimated $13.5 million to rigorously evaluate approaches that prevent firearm-related violence, with applications expected to close December 1, 2026.

For NIH- and CDC-funded researchers who study injury and violence, that forecast is the clearest signal in two years that the federal firearm-research pipeline is not only intact but expanding. The National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (NCIPC) — the Injury Center — is the agency arm behind the announcement, and it is soliciting investigator-initiated science, not contract deliverables. If you run a violence-prevention lab, direct a trauma or emergency-medicine research group, or hold a faculty appointment in public health, criminology, or health policy, this is a mechanism built for your grant, not a pass-through you have to squeeze into.

What RFA-CE-27-014 actually funds

The primary source is the Grants.gov forecast record for opportunity 363137, published July 9, 2026. It describes an NCIPC solicitation for "investigator-initiated research to rigorously evaluate the effectiveness of innovative and promising approaches to prevent all forms of firearm-related injuries, deaths, violence, or crime without infringing on the rights of legal firearm owners." That last clause matters: it is the statutory framing the CDC has used since the Dickey Amendment thaw, and it defines the political envelope your specific aims need to live inside.

The scope is deliberately broad. The forecast names six forms of firearm harm in play: mass shooting incidents, defensive gun use incidents, firearm-related homicides and assaults, firearm-related suicides and self-harm, unintentional firearm deaths and injuries, and firearm-related crime. It also enumerates the kinds of evaluation the Injury Center wants to fund — scaling up, expanding, or improving approaches across population groups (children, youth, young adults, active-duty military and veterans, rural communities, tribal populations, people at risk of harming themselves or others, and those in situations of family and intimate partner violence) and across settings (rural and urban, home, school, neighborhood, community, and online).

The word doing the heaviest lifting in the title is "rigorously." This is not a surveillance or descriptive-epidemiology call. NCIPC is asking for effectiveness evaluation — designs that can credibly estimate whether an intervention changes an outcome. Investigators who have spent the last funding cycle building measurement infrastructure now have a mechanism that rewards moving from "what is happening" to "what works."

Two funding options, two very different studies

The most consequential design detail is that RFA-CE-27-014 splits into two funding options, and applicants pick one — not both.

Funding Option A supports projects that rely on existing data to evaluate effectiveness and do not fund the implementation of prevention activities. These are funded up to $350,000 per year in combined direct and indirect costs, for a period of performance up to two years. If your team has a secondary-data design — a natural experiment off a policy change, a linked administrative dataset, a difference-in-differences on hospital or crime records — Option A is the lane, and it is a faster, leaner award.

Funding Option B supports projects that require new data collection and/or the implementation of prevention activities to evaluate effectiveness. These are funded up to $650,000 per year in combined direct and indirect costs, for a period of performance up to three years. Option B is the mechanism for a prospective evaluation of a program you intend to stand up and measure — a hospital-based violence intervention, a lethal-means-counseling protocol, a community-level initiative — where you need to fund the intervention and the science together.

That $650,000 ceiling is inclusive of indirect costs, so model your F&A recovery against it early. A lab accustomed to R01 budgeting where indirects sit on top of a direct-cost cap will find the effective research spend under Option B is meaningfully tighter than the headline number suggests.

The numbers, and what they signal

The forecast puts an estimated $13.5 million on the table across an expected 12 awards, with an award ceiling of $650,000 and no stated floor. Twelve awards against a $13.5 million pool is a genuinely fundable slate — the CDC firearm portfolio has historically run eight to ten awards per cycle, so 12 is at the high end of what NCIPC has offered under this line of solicitations.

It also reads as a deliberate continuation. NCIPC has run this "rigorously evaluate innovative and promising strategies" series across prior cycles — RFA-CE-23-006 funded eight awards, and the RFA-CE-25 iteration carried a comparable ceiling. RFA-CE-27-014 keeps the ceiling steady and raises the award count, which is the opposite of a program being wound down. For a research community that has spent a decade uncertain whether federal firearm-injury money would survive from one appropriations fight to the next, a forecast that expands the slate is the substantive story here — not a generic "funding is up" line, but a specific mechanism holding its ceiling and adding slots.

The timeline is the strategy

Because this is a forecast rather than a posted synopsis, the dates are estimates — but they are actionable estimates, and the gap between them is where competitive applications get built.

The forecast lists an estimated synopsis posting date of October 1, 2026, an estimated application due date of December 1, 2026, an estimated award date of August 28, 2027, and an estimated project start of September 30, 2027. The archive date on the forecast is January 2, 2027. Read those dates together and the message is unambiguous: you have the summer and early fall to assemble a team, secure data-use agreements or site commitments, and draft specific aims before the synopsis even drops.

That roughly 60-day window between the estimated October 1 posting and the December 1 due date is short for a study of this rigor — especially for Option B applicants who need site letters, IRB pathways, and an implementation plan. The investigators who win in December will be the ones who treated the July forecast as the starting gun, not the October synopsis. Lock your data-use agreements now; they are the single most common reason a firearm-evaluation application slips a cycle.

Eligibility in the forecast is broad — state and local governments, tribal governments and organizations, public and private institutions of higher education, independent school districts, and both 501(c)(3) and non-501(c)(3) nonprofits — with the note that additional eligibility detail will appear in the full NOFO. Universities and their affiliated research institutes are squarely in scope. Direct programmatic questions to the listed NCIPC contact, Joyce Dieterly, at ncipc_erpo@cdc.gov.

How to move before October

The practical work between now and the synopsis is not writing prose — it is de-risking the application. Decide Option A versus B first, because it determines your budget, your timeline, and whether you need site partners at all. Then pressure-test your evaluation design against the word "rigorously": if a reviewer cannot see how you will produce a credible counterfactual, the aim will not survive study section, regardless of how promising the intervention is.

It is also worth watching the companion CDC violence-prevention solicitations moving through Grants.gov in the same window — the youth-violence prevention center RFA in particular — so you route your idea to the mechanism that fits it rather than forcing an evaluation study into a center grant or vice versa. Reading the forecasts side by side keeps you from misfiling a strong idea.

If you want to see which firearm- and injury-prevention opportunities are open right now while RFA-CE-27-014 works through its forecast-to-synopsis path, search active federal solicitations on Granted: grantedai.com/grants?q=firearm+violence+prevention+research. It surfaces live CDC and NIH injury mechanisms in one place so you are tracking the whole landscape, not a single forecast. For more on positioning federal research applications, Granted's guides are collected at grantedai.com/blog.

The through-line for principal investigators is simple. RFA-CE-27-014 is real, it is funded at the top of its historical range, and its most important date has already passed — July 9, when the clock on a December application quietly started.