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Setting Up to Submit Federal Grants

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A practical setup guide for the accounts, identifiers, and team workflows you need before your first SBIR, STTR, or research-grant submission. Done up front, this saves your team two weeks of unblocking work the night a deadline is two days out.

Important: This is a practical operations guide, not legal or compliance advice. Federal portals change UI, requirements, and policies frequently — verify deadlines and current rules with each agency before you submit.

1. Set up a grants distribution list / shared mailbox first

Before you touch a single federal portal, set up a shared mailbox for grant correspondence. Every account you'll create — SAM.gov, Login.gov, ORCID, eRA Commons, agency portals, program-manager threads — sends confirmation emails, password resets, deadline notices, and reviewer correspondence to one email address. That address should be a shared inbox, not a personal account.

Reasons:

Outlook shared inboxes are ideal — multiple users can send-as the same address with a unified archive. Google Workspace Collaborative Inboxes (via Groups) work too. A plain distribution list is acceptable as a starting point but doesn't keep a central archive — upgrade to a shared inbox as soon as you can.

Example layout

For a four-person submission team:

Role Member Why they're on the list
PI Dr. Jimmy Jia Scientific direction; lead correspondent for program managers
Research team Dr. Mariela Alfonzo Technical contributions, co-authorship, follow-ups on technical questions
Operations Philip Risser Logistics, compliance, deadline tracking, budget questions
Other / catch-all Evan Taylor Backup access, archive owner, escalation

(Names above are Science Founders board members shown for illustration only — substitute your own team.)

Address: grants@sciencefounders.org (use your own company's domain).

Use this shared address as the contact email everywhere — SAM.gov, Login.gov, ORCID admin, agency portals, proposal submissions. Personal email accounts on these systems will haunt you when someone leaves the team or transitions roles. The account-recovery flows on federal portals are slow and email-based — make sure the email survives staff changes.

2. SAM.gov — start here

SAM.gov is the System for Award Management. You cannot apply for a federal grant or contract without it. Start the registration the day your entity is formed.

Item Where it comes from Save offline
UEI SAM.gov registration ✓
CAGE code Auto-issued after SAM.gov approval ✓
Registration expiration One year from issuance Calendar reminder 60 days out
SAM.gov account admin email Your shared grants@ mailbox ✓

3. Login.gov — federated identity for the people who submit

Login.gov is a single federated login service across multiple federal grant systems. Setting it up early gives a single-sign-on identity that works on SAM.gov, Grants.gov, and several agency portals.

4. ORCID — every named team member needs one

ORCID is both a federated login system and a research-activity platform. It's the single source of truth for an individual's publication record and grant track record — and federal grant systems (especially NSF and NIH) increasingly pull from it directly.

Suggestion. Use a personal email account as the primary contact on ORCID, with your company / institution email as a secondary. That way the account moves with you when affiliations change.

5. NIH SciENcv — auto-generate your BioSketch and Current & Pending

SciENcv (Science Experts Network Curriculum Vitae) is an NCBI-hosted service that automatically generates biographical sketches and certified Current & Pending (Other) Support forms for NSF, NIH, and the Department of Energy from a maintained ORCID profile.

Why this matters: most federal proposals require a BioSketch for each senior / key person, and a Current & Pending Support form for each PI. Both are tedious to fill in by hand, error-prone, and have to be re-done in slightly different formats for every proposal. SciENcv lets you maintain the data once in ORCID, then generate a properly formatted PDF on demand in the right agency template.

The workflow:

  1. Each team member registers an ORCID iD.
  2. Each team member maintains education, employment, and publications in ORCID month-to-month.
  3. When a proposal is due, log into SciENcv, link ORCID, and generate the BioSketch and Current & Pending PDFs in the agency-specific format.
  4. Attach to the proposal package.

If you keep ORCID current, generating a BioSketch the day before a deadline takes minutes instead of hours. If you let ORCID go stale, you'll be hand-editing PDFs at 2 a.m. with the wrong template.

6. Grants.gov — designate your Authorized Organization Representative (AOR)

Grants.gov is the cross-agency portal where many federal opportunities are listed and proposals are submitted. Setting up Grants.gov correctly trips up almost every founder the first time, because of how the roles work.

⚠ Warning. Creating a Grants.gov account does not automatically give you permission to submit proposals on behalf of your company. You also have to be explicitly designated as an Authorized Organization Representative (AOR) — and this is not the default. People create the account, try to submit, and find out they can't.

How it actually works:

  1. EBiz POC. When your company was registered on SAM.gov, one person was designated as the E-Business Point of Contact (EBiz POC). That role lives in SAM.gov and is the gatekeeper for Grants.gov — only the EBiz POC can approve other team members as AORs.
  2. Individual account. Each PI, administrator, or other person who will submit on Grants.gov creates their own individual Grants.gov account.
  3. Affiliate with your organization. During account setup, the individual selects your organization (looked up by UEI). They're added as an "Applicant" with no submission permissions.
  4. AOR designation. The EBiz POC logs into Grants.gov, sees the pending AOR request, and grants the role. Only then can that individual actually submit proposals on behalf of the company.

Why this trips people up:

Checklist:

7. DOE PAMS — read this before you log in

If you're applying for Department of Energy SBIRs, DOE Office of Science grants, or related programs, you'll use PAMS (Portfolio Analysis and Management System) at https://pamspublic.science.energy.gov.

⚠ WARNING — DO NOT CLOSE YOUR BROWSER WHILE LOGGED INTO PAMS. Closing the browser tab or window without using the green logout button in the PAMS UI will lock your account. Recovery requires opening a ticket with the PAMS help desk, exchanging emails, and waiting for them to reset your session — a process that can take a full business day. This is the single most common DOE-applicant disaster, and it always happens at 11 p.m. the night before a deadline. Always click the green logout button. Always.

Setup notes:

8. Adobe Acrobat — non-negotiable for some PDF forms

⚠ Warning. Several federal proposal packages — including some NSF, DOD, and DOE/DOW PDF forms — only render and submit correctly in Adobe Acrobat. macOS Preview, third-party PDF tools, and even the free Adobe Reader (in some cases) can silently corrupt these forms when you save them.

These PDFs use Acrobat-specific form features (XFA forms, dynamic JavaScript-driven fields, embedded validation logic) that other PDF readers either can't render or quietly mangle on save. You can lose a proposal slot to a form that looked filled in on your screen but submitted blank.

9. Other agency systems you'll likely encounter

Beyond SAM.gov, Login.gov, ORCID, and SciENcv, each agency has its own identity / submission system. The most common across science-startup proposals:

System Agency What it's for
Grants.gov Cross-agency Discovery and submission for many federal grants
Research.gov NSF NSF proposal submission, awards management
eRA Commons NIH NIH proposal submission, progress reports, awards management
PAMS DOE Office of Science DOE Office of Science SBIR/STTR and research-grant submissions
EERE Exchange DOE EERE/BETO DOE EERE/BETO funding-opportunity submissions
USDA NIFA USDA USDA SBIR/STTR and research-grant submissions
DSIP DOD DOD SBIR/STTR submissions

Each system requires its own account. Use the shared grants@ mailbox as the contact address; tie individual user accounts to Login.gov and/or ORCID wherever supported.

10. Setup checklist

## Shared mailbox & team
  - [ ] grants@<your-domain> shared inbox set up (Outlook shared inbox or Google Collaborative Inbox)
  - [ ] PI, research team, ops, and backup members added with send-as access
  - [ ] Email signature and out-of-office routing configured
  
  ## Entity identifiers
  - [ ] SAM.gov registration started using a real physical address
  - [ ] UEI received and saved offline
  - [ ] CAGE code received and saved offline
  - [ ] SAM.gov renewal date in calendar (60-day reminder)
  
  ## Federated logins
  - [ ] Login.gov account for each PI and Ops user (under their own name)
  - [ ] ORCID iD for every research team member, using a personal email
  - [ ] ORCID profiles populated with education, employment, and publications
  - [ ] SciENcv account linked to ORCID and NSF Research.gov
  
  ## Agency systems (as needed for your proposals)
  - [ ] Grants.gov account for each submitter (linked to organization UEI)
  - [ ] EBiz POC confirmed in SAM.gov; each submitter approved as an AOR by the EBiz POC
  - [ ] At least two AORs designated so a single absence does not block submissions
  - [ ] Research.gov (NSF) account
  - [ ] eRA Commons (NIH) account
  - [ ] DOE PAMS institution + individual accounts
  - [ ] DOE EERE Exchange account
  - [ ] DOD DSIP account
  
  ## Submission tooling
  - [ ] Adobe Acrobat installed and licensed on the proposal-writing computer
  - [ ] One round-trip test (fill → save → reopen → verify) on each agency's PDF forms
  - [ ] Shared drive / folder for in-flight proposals
  - [ ] Calendar reminders for upcoming FOA deadlines (with 14-day pre-warnings)

This guide pairs with the Incorporated to Operational guide (operational steps beyond setup) and the SBIR Agency Links & Resources directory (where the actual FOAs live).