“Every funding opportunity in the United States” describes the coverage ambition of this project. It is not a description of a database that exists today. This page says where the line currently sits, and how it moves.

What “every” means. Every institution and every opportunity belongs in the discovery ambition. A claim of completeness belongs only to a defined population, source, time window, and access boundary that have been checked. A claim such as “all 642 records returned by this source for this date window were imported” can be verified. “Every opportunity in America” cannot be established by a large row count, a map with fifty coloured states, or a crawler run that exited zero.

The coverage charter

Each release states its own boundary, in writing, before collection starts. The charter names:

institution classes in scope;
geography — the fifty states, the District of Columbia, and whichever territories the release includes;
opportunity families and publication languages;
the date range, and how archived material is treated;
public access versus authorized private access;
exclusions, each with a reason and a review date.

Tribal governments are a separate sovereign category, not a county subdivision. An exclusion is a dated decision, not a permanent verdict — which is the point: scope grows through named, reviewable work rather than through more ambitious language.

Five measures, never added together

“Coverage” has more than one denominator, and averaging them hides exactly the failure you need to see. They are published separately:

Institution discovery: How many entities in a defined directory have been reviewed.
Source onboarding: How many verified publication locations have a working collection path.
Notice reconciliation: How many records returned by a bounded source query were imported.
Document completeness: How many expected attachments were acquired.
Freshness: Whether the last successful verification met the source's target interval.

What a missing result actually means

Four outcomes, and only two of them are findings:

Verified public source — a working collection path exists.
Verified restricted source — it exists, and access is conditional; the access status is recorded.
No relevant publication found after the stated checks — a research state, not proof of permanent absence.
Unresolved identity — also a research state; it becomes a discovery task.

A blocked source may still contain open notices, and an active source may legitimately have none. Neither condition is allowed to render as “nothing available”.

What a record is allowed to say

Unknown values stay visible. A record with an uncertain deadline can still help a reader; a record with an invented deadline actively misleads one. An award is stored as historical intelligence about a funder's interests — it is never converted into a currently available opportunity because its description resembles the work you want to do.

Nothing on this site is an offer. An advertised program or portal is not a promise that funding is currently available to a particular applicant, and nothing here is advice about eligibility. The institution that published a notice sets its terms.

An honest boundary beats a bigger number

The coverage charter

Five measures, never added together

What a missing result actually means

What a record is allowed to say

Tell us the sources you cannot afford to miss