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Extended Grants.gov Downtime Impacts Due Dates in September

August 22, 2022

Grants.gov has a planned system outage to migrate services to the Cloud on Friday, September 23 – Thursday, September 29, 2022.

Impacts for Northwestern
During Grants.gov downtime, InfoEd users:

  • Will still be able to create, develop, and review applications in Proposal Development. NIH pre-submission validation and image building will also continue to function from InfoEd.
  • Will not be able to submit (or resubmit) applications that rely on Grants.gov. Clicking the “Submit to Grants.gov” button during this Grants.gov downtime will result in failure. Submissions will not be queued for later processing. Additional details, including FAQs, are available in a recent Grants.gov blog post.

Note that NIH ASSIST uses Grants.gov, which is why NIH is impacted by this downtime. However, proposals submitted in other systems, such as NSF’s systems, NASA NSPIRES, and non-federal agencies, will not be affected.

Deadline Impacts
NIH has announced their policies for impacted deadlines, but as of the time of this post, other Federal sponsors have not done so.

  • NIH and AHRQ deadlines that fall on or between September 22 – 30, 2022 will move to October 3, 2022. For the full announcement see NIH Notice NOT-OD-22-190. Please note that October 3 is a Monday, and October 1 and 2 are not business days on which proposals will be reviewed or submitted by Sponsored Research.
  • For other agencies, which have not announced due date changes to accommodate the Grants.gov downtime, plan to use September 22, 2022, or before, as the due date.

Submission Recommendation
Sponsored Research recommends that investigators submit applications that are due September 22 – 30, 2022 to any Federal sponsor that uses Grants.gov, including NIH, BEFORE the scheduled system downtime. This means submitting all administrative and technical components in final submission-ready form to Sponsored Research no later than September 20, 2022.