Last Update: July 5, 2019
Every competitive announcement MUST have a Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO). The NOFO will be available on Grants.gov along with the application package. It will be the primary reference document for applicants. All grant programs must continue to develop NOFO announcements, which incorporate all substantive grant provisions, such as application requirements, evaluation criteria and selection procedures, and to make it available on Grants.gov. The Financial Assistance law Division (FALD) will forward to the Office of the Assistant General Counsel for Legislation and Regulation (L&R), those NOFO announcements with funding that exceeds $100 million and announcements for new grant programs, so that L&R may coordinate the review and clearance of those announcements with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

The change in policy does not supersede any statutory or regulatory requirements to publish a Notice of Funding Availability, or other similar notice, in the Federal Register. Agencies must still publish such notices if required to do so by any law or regulation. For these situations, Grants Online also provides the capability to publish Federal Register Notices.

Competitive grant opportunities will be posted at Grants.gov throughout the fiscal year. Federal Program Officers are reminded that your Grants Management Specialist must be listed as an the Optional Reviewer prior to your NOFO being routed to FALD.

The NOFO has a Federal-wide standard format, as required by the Office of Management and Budget. Additionally, the Department of Commerce (herinafter referred to as "the Department") has determined that there will be a required standard format, modeled on the NOFO, for the Federal Register Notice. By creating the NOFO, you are also creating the wording for publication in the Federal Register Notice.

The links directly below display the outline and format of the Notice of Funding Opportunity details page that you will see in Grants Online. This page is essentially the format of the Notice of Funding Opportunity report, which will be posted at Grants.gov. Fields on the NOFO page that are not in the NOFO report are noted.

Why do I get an error when I try to print the report?
If you copy/paste your NOFO field from a Word document to Grants Online, it is possible that you will copy non-ASCII characters. A non-ASCII character appears as a small box in the Grants Online NOFO field. These characters cannot be printed by the reporting engine and will cause an html page display error. To correct this problem, search your text for the square boxes and replace them with ASCII characters. The most common non-ASCII characters copied from Word are the left-quote, right-quote, and m-dash.

Notice of Funding Opportunity

Please click on this icon to view the audit trail on this NOFO:
(The audit trail link displays the document changes on a field-by-field basis. This is of tremendous assistance to the FALD attorneys who must approve the document for publication.

Please read the appropriate guidance documents before filling out the fields below. (this document)

Regulatory Information Number (RIN) FRN only.
Leave this field alone. It is for the RFA publisher.

Executive Summary