SimplerGrants Product and Delivery

Federal grants are meant to reach the communities that need them. Too often, the systems in between the grants and the communities get in the way. Grant seekers may spend between eighty and two hundred hours searching for and applying to grant opportunities, often re-entering the same search terms and application details across multiple portals. For federal grants the burden is especially high: the announcements themselves are often so dense that understanding the opportunity becomes a barrier before an applicant can even begin.

Grants.gov, the federal government's central platform for grant funding, hosts millions of users and hundreds of billions of dollars in opportunities each year. That scale gave HHS a chance to address these problems directly, and to set an example other public and private grant systems could follow. But Grants.gov runs on a codebase built more than twenty years ago, making those problems hard to fix.

HHS's Office of Grants set out to change the grant experience with SimplerGrants, a multi-year modernization effort built in the open. Since June 2023, Agile Six has been part of it, working across three coordinated efforts:

1. Rebuilding Grants.gov from the ground up to modernize and improve the platform.
2. Simplifying how grant announcements are drafted and published on that platform, so they're easier to read and act on.
3. Establishing CommonGrants, a FHIR- and FDX-style standard for grant data, that connects federal opportunities and awards to the broader grants ecosystem.

What we delivered

We began by helping HHS modernize the platform itself. While providing ongoing product strategy and delivery support, we helped establish the practices that a project built in the open needs to succeed, such as documenting technical decisions, building a dashboard to track sprint and delivery health, and introducing a public feature voting board where the people who use the platform can help shape the roadmap. Together, these practices gave HHS better visibility into team progress and user priorities, while making Simpler.Grants.gov a strong reference for transparent federal software delivery.

But modernizing the platform only solves part of the problem if the information on it remains difficult to understand. To make funding opportunities easier for grant seekers to read, evaluate, and act on, Agile Six is helping HHS simplify how Notices of Funding Opportunity (NOFOs) are prepared and published. Working alongside HHS staff and plain-language coaches, the team combines product and design support, training, improvements to NOFO Builder, and AI-assisted coaching to help operating divisions produce clear, consistent announcements while keeping editorial decisions with NOFO authors and subject matter experts.

While making Simpler.Grants.gov easier to use is an important step, grant seekers rarely interact with just one grants system. They search across federal, state, local, and private portals that all represent grant information differently. Unlike healthcare, which has FHIR, or banking, which has FDX, the grants ecosystem lacks a widely adopted standard for exchanging data.

To address that challenge, HHS engaged Agile Six to define and maintain CommonGrants, an open data standard and API protocol for grant opportunities, applications, and awards. We developed open-source tooling, implemented the standard within the Simpler.Grants.gov API, and demonstrated interoperability by bringing grant data from California, Washington, Pennsylvania, and Maryland into a common format behind a single sample portal. Using their existing public APIs, we connected grant opportunities from Washington and Maryland to that common format in about two hours, showing how quickly the model can accommodate new sources.

One example of what this foundation enables is an MCP server our Innovation Lab built on top of CommonGrants. It lets grant seekers ask Claude or ChatGPT about federal and state funding opportunities in plain language, using a shared data model instead of searching multiple portals independently. To help ensure innovations like these remain portable across the ecosystem, we also convened a Community Stewardship Group of public and private partners to guide CommonGrants as an open, community-driven standard.

For a grant seeker, the promise is straightforward: less time spent searching across fragmented systems and navigating duplicative processes, and more time focused on putting funding to work in their communities.