Pp Grants

Research Grants Finder — Printing Press CLI

Prerequisites: Install the CLI

This skill drives the grants-pp-cli binary. You must verify the CLI is installed before invoking any command from this skill. If it is missing, install it first:

1. Install via the Printing Press installer. It defaults binaries to $HOME/.local/bin on macOS/Linux and %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\PrintingPress\bin on Windows:

   npx -y @mvanhorn/printing-press-library install grants --cli-only

2. Verify with the version subcommand.
3. Ensure the reported install directory is on $PATH for the agent/runtime that will invoke this skill.

No API key is required — all three upstream APIs (Grants.gov Search2, NIH RePORTER, NSF Awards) are public and keyless.

Note: this CLI uses the Go standard-library flag package rather than cobra, so its usage examples below are shown as plain text. Run the help subcommand for the authoritative flag list; behavior is identical to the recipes shown.

What it does

• search — open federal funding opportunities from Grants.gov (NIH, NSF, and every other federal agency).
• nih — awarded NIH projects from RePORTER, sorted by award size, to benchmark how much a topic typically gets. Restricted to award types an external applicant can compete for; include-centers adds center, program and consortium awards, which are one to two orders of magnitude larger. A median accompanies the listing, because sorting by size shows the largest awards rather than representative ones.
• nsf — awarded NSF grants.
• doctor — live health check of all three upstream APIs.

Every command accepts a json flag for machine-readable output, and flags may appear anywhere on the command line.

Recipes

Find open opportunities, filter by deadline, agency, award size, or eligibility:

grants-pp-cli search "cancer imaging"
grants-pp-cli search "cancer imaging" --closing-before 2026-12-31 --rows 50
grants-pp-cli search cancer --agency HHS-NIH11 --rows 10
grants-pp-cli search microbiome --details
grants-pp-cli search microbiome --min-award 500000
grants-pp-cli search microbiome --eligibility "small business"

Notes on the search filters:

• The deadline filter (closing-before, format YYYY-MM-DD) is applied client-side within the fetched page; a stderr warning appears when the page was full and the list may be truncated — raise the rows value for fuller coverage.
• The agency filter takes a plain string agency code such as HHS-NIH11 or NSF.
• The minimum-award filter uses awardCeiling with an estimatedFunding fallback, because Grants.gov often reports a zero ceiling; estimated values are labelled in the output.
• The award and eligibility filters fetch per-opportunity details, so they are slower.

Benchmark awarded funding for a topic:

grants-pp-cli nih "gut microbiome" --year 2025 --min-amount 1000000
grants-pp-cli nih "gut microbiome" --year 2025 --include-centers
grants-pp-cli nsf "quantum computing" --rows 25 --min-amount 500000

Notes on the NIH benchmark:

• Results cover research project grants, high-risk awards and career transition awards — the types an individual investigator applies for. Procurement contracts and NIH intramural projects are excluded: neither is open to an outside applicant, and both are large enough to dominate a size-sorted list.
• include-centers widens the search to center, program and consortium awards. These are competable but fund the running of a research center rather than a single research idea, and they are one to two orders of magnitude larger.
• The listing is sorted by award size, so it shows the largest awards. Read the median line beneath it for what a typical award actually looks like — the two routinely differ by a factor of five or more.
• The keyword is matched against project title and abstract only. RePORTER also indexes a machine-generated concept tag list, but those tags are attached independently of a project's subject and match facility and administrative awards.

JSON output for scripting, and a health check before a session:

grants-pp-cli search cancer --rows 5 --json
grants-pp-cli nih cancer --json
grants-pp-cli doctor

The nih JSON payload carries a typical_award object alongside the projects, holding the median, the bracket it was located in, and the population it describes.

Notes for agents

• NIH/NSF results are awarded (historical) grants; open calls come only from the search command.
• NSF results are pooled across several pages, deduplicated by title, matched on word stems and ranked with title hits first — a single upstream page is neither relevance-ordered nor complete.
• Grants.gov dates in results are MM/DD/YYYY; the deadline filter takes YYYY-MM-DD.
• Exit codes: 0 success, 1 upstream/API error, 2 usage error.