grantsgov-mcp-server

Public Hosted Server: https://grantsgov.caseyjhand.com/mcp

Overview

US federal funding opportunities from Grants.gov, covering every agency's forecasted, posted, closed, and archived notices. Search by keyword, agency, applicant type, funding category, assistance listing, or deadline window, then read a full record: award range, eligibility, key dates, agency contact, and NOFO attachments. No API key required.

Tools

The grantsgov-guide skill covers funding shortlists, eligibility and deadline review, and application requirements. It ships with the package and plugins and is available over MCP as skill://grantsgov-guide/SKILL.md.

Related MCP server: ca-grants

Capability reference

grantsgov_search_opportunities tool

• Filters: keyword, statuses (default forecasted and posted), agencies (a code includes its sub-agencies), eligibilities, funding_categories, funding_instruments, assistance_listing (one ALN), opportunity_number (exact match), posted_within_days, closing_within_days

• eligibilities also matches opportunities open to any applicant type (code 99) unless include_unrestricted is false

• Keyword terms are all required; join alternatives with OR, quote phrases, exclude with NOT or -term, and use a trailing * for prefixes. An ungrouped AND/OR mix or a field prefix (agency:NSF) fails as invalid_keyword

• closing_within_days (0–365) scans posted opportunities by close date; it allows only the posted status and the close_date_asc sort, and posted_within_days rejects closed and archived (filter_conflict). total_count_kind distinguishes exact counts from lower bounds when the scan is incomplete; next_offset reaches only remaining scanned matches

• Up to 100 rows per page (default 25); limit accepts 1–1,000 and values above 100 are capped with a notice. Offset paging uses next_offset; effective_keyword and applied_filters echo what was sent. Sub-agency facets count each subtree under the current upstream query; include_facets: false drops the facet counts

• Rows carry close_date_kind (fixed, none_listed, placeholder) and days_until_close, but no award amounts. Unknown codes fail as unknown_agency, unknown_eligibility, or unknown_funding_category

grantsgov_get_opportunity tool

• Accept up to 50 nonblank entries per identifier list and 50 normalized unique identifiers combined. Read the first 5 identifiers, ids before numbers; deferred_ids, deferred_numbers, and an executable continuation carry the remaining queue with the original section offsets. Numbers resolve across all four statuses; selected aliases fetch a record once per call

• A miss or a number shared by several opportunities comes back in unresolved[] as not_found or ambiguous (with candidates), not as an error

• Records carry the close date (an estimate on forecasts, flagged by close_date_is_estimate), award ceiling and floor, total funding, expected awards, cost sharing, applicant types with the eligibility narrative, assistance listings, and the agency contact

• Funding and eligibility fields come from the synopsis or forecast block matching doc_type, named in money_source; forecasts add forecast_estimates

• Independent pages: description 12,000 characters, eligibility narrative 6,000, funding-category explanation 2,000, attachments 30, application packages 10, and related opportunities 10. The six zero-based inputs are description_offset, eligibility_offset, funding_category_explanation_offset, attachment_offset, application_package_offset, and related_opportunity_offset (default 0). Each record's pages supplies full totals and executable single-opportunity continuations; partial narratives retain *_truncated, and past-end pages are empty. Attachments include download_url and the unchanged upstream created_date when listed

• last_revision_note and last_revision_changed summarize the active synopsis or forecast's latest revision when listed. Changed names map to public fields; unknown names keep an upstream: prefix. Missing metadata does not mean nothing changed

grantsgov_list_reference tool

• topic: agencies, eligibilities, funding_categories, funding_instruments, statuses, sort_options, or keyword_syntax

• Codes come from a live Grants.gov snapshot, cached for 24 hours and dated by snapshot_date, with open_count (forecasted and posted) and total_count per code (statuses carries total_count only); sort_options and keyword_syntax are static

• Up to 100 entries per page (default 50); limit accepts 1–1,000 and values above 100 are capped with a notice. Filters apply before paging; continuation preserves the complete next-call arguments

• A failed refresh can serve expired data with reference_cache disclosing stale status, the failure reason, and retry time. Searches using that vocabulary disclose the same degradation and snapshot timestamp

• agencies lists the top level by default; parent_code lists every code under one agency, and name_contains matches labels and codes on any topic (for agencies, at every level)

• parent_code with another topic fails as filter_not_applicable; an unknown code fails as unknown_parent_code

Features

Built on @cyanheads/mcp-ts-core: stdio and Streamable HTTP transports, pluggable auth (none / jwt / oauth), swappable storage (in-memory, filesystem, Supabase, Cloudflare KV/R2/D1), structured logging with optional OpenTelemetry tracing.

Grants.gov-specific:

• List inputs accept one whole string or an array; blank values and members read as unset. Strings are never split on commas, spaces, or line breaks

• Keyless client for the Grants.gov REST API (search2, fetchOpportunity), with retries and at most 4 concurrent upstream requests per process

• Inputs mapped to the form Grants.gov reads as intended: bare keyword terms joined with AND, hyphenated tokens (COVID-19, K-12) matched as phrases, agency codes expanded to their sub-agency subtree, opportunity numbers matched literally, and filter codes checked against the live vocabulary

• Deadlines counted from today in US Eastern Time, the zone Grants.gov publishes in; far-future stand-in close dates are flagged placeholder rather than reported as deadlines

• HTML5 entities decoded in human-readable fields; narrative HTML converted to plain text with table cell and row boundaries preserved. In content[], agency prose renders as literal text, identifiers retain code styling, multi-line fields render as blockquotes, and inline text is flattened to one line

Agent-friendly output:

• Echo of what ran: effective_keyword and applied_filters, including defaulted statuses, the expanded agency filter, and the added code 99

• Discriminated fields: close_date_kind, doc_type, money_source, and unresolved[].outcome let callers branch on data

• Empty-result and paging notices that name the next call, such as counts of closed and archived matches when the default statuses found nothing, or the next close date when a closing window is empty

• Typed failure reasons with recovery hints, including upstream_unavailable, rate_limited, and upstream_route_unavailable for Grants.gov outages

Getting started

Connect to the hosted instance, no install:

claude mcp add --transport http grantsgov-mcp-server https://grantsgov.caseyjhand.com/mcp

Or run it locally:

claude mcp add grantsgov-mcp-server -- npx -y @cyanheads/grantsgov-mcp-server

For other clients, add this to the MCP config file:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "grantsgov-mcp-server": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@cyanheads/grantsgov-mcp-server"]
    }
  }
}

No API key is required. For Docker or a source build, see Running the server.

Configuration

The server reads no configuration of its own: the Grants.gov API is keyless and its endpoints are fixed. These framework variables control transport, auth, and logging.

See .env.example for the full list of optional overrides.

Running the server

Local development

Requires Bun v1.4.0 or higher (or Node.js v24+) and network access to api.grants.gov.

• Clone and install:

  git clone https://github.com/cyanheads/grantsgov-mcp-server.git
  cd grantsgov-mcp-server && bun install
  cp .env.example .env   # optional framework overrides

• Build and run the production version:

  # One-time build
  bun run rebuild
  
  # Run the built server
  bun run start:http
  # or
  bun run start:stdio

• Run checks and tests:

  bun run devcheck  # Lints, formats, type-checks, and more
  bun run test      # Runs the test suite

Docker

docker run --rm -p 3010:3010 ghcr.io/cyanheads/grantsgov-mcp-server:latest

The image defaults to HTTP transport, stateless session mode, and logs to /var/log/grantsgov-mcp-server. To run over stdio from an MCP client, use "command": "docker" with "args": ["run", "-i", "--rm", "-e", "MCP_TRANSPORT_TYPE=stdio", "ghcr.io/cyanheads/grantsgov-mcp-server:latest"]. To build locally, docker build -t grantsgov-mcp-server .; OpenTelemetry peer dependencies are installed by default — build with --build-arg OTEL_ENABLED=false to omit them.

Project structure

Development guide

See CLAUDE.md for development guidelines and architectural rules. The short version:

• Handlers throw, framework catches — no try/catch in tool logic

• Use ctx.log for logging and ctx.fail with the tool's declared error reasons

• Register new tools in src/mcp-server/tools/definitions/index.ts

• Wrap external API calls: validate raw → normalize to domain type → return output schema; never fabricate missing fields

Contributing

Issues are welcome. Run checks and tests before submitting:

bun run devcheck
bun run test

Data source

Opportunity data comes from Grants.gov, where federal agencies post their funding opportunities. The records are US government works. This project is not affiliated with or endorsed by Grants.gov or any federal agency.

License

This project is licensed under the Apache 2.0 License. See the LICENSE file for details.