21. Department of Commerce · Minor
Use small innovation prizes and competitions for NOAA research
Printed page 677 21. Department of Commerce
“Use Small Innovation Prizes and Competitions to Encourage High-Quality Research. Lowering the barriers of entry for startups and small businesses will also provide greater innovation without excessive increases in spending. … Multiple competitions should take place in cities to attract a variety of innovators and investors to propel innovation forward in a way that benefits the needs of NOAA.”
What has happened
- Not started
Nothing found, and the record moved the other way. The federal index of prize competitions the Quote's mechanism runs on was shut: "The Challenge.gov platform was sunset on March 30, 2026", and with it the portal agencies used to manage and advertise competitions — challenge managers must now "promote challenges on your own website or other channels" and "provide your own application and participation process". What survives is a short curated list on USA.gov of active federal challenges: twelve on 2026-09-06, and every one of them was opened to check its sponsoring agency — NASA (two), the Administration for Community Living (two), the Administration for Children and Families, the Department of Education, the Bureau of Reclamation, NIH, CDC, the Army (two) and one further Labor-side listing. Not one is NOAA's, or anywhere else in Commerce. Commerce's own prize machinery is intact but dormant — its generic Paperwork Reduction Act clearance for challenge solicitations (OMB 0690-0031) was put out for extension on 2026-01-20, and the notice describes it as covering "challenges and competitions that the Department of Commerce posts on the General Service Administration (GSA)'s Challenge.gov website since passage of the America COMPETES Act of 2011". That is standing machinery predating the ask, renewed unchanged, not an act of using it: no new NOAA prize, and no city-based competition. The one prize in the FY2027 Congressional Justification — 'At least one Genius Prize awarded for Save Our Seas Innovation' — is the marine-debris prize Congress created in the Save Our Seas 2.0 Act in 2020 and continues to require.
Research log
What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence
Research notes
Negative search: grep -n -i "prize" and competition over the text-extracted FY2026 and FY2027
NOAA Congressional Justifications (one hit, the statutory Genius Prize); Federal Register full text
since 2025-01-20 for "prize competition" and "America COMPETES" restricted to the Commerce
Department slug; and a jq pass over the NOAA slice of fr-notice.ndjson for prize|challenge| competition (three hits in the whole window, none a NOAA competition: the Commerce PRA extension
above, a Census population-estimates challenge procedure rule, and a Manufacturing USA institute
competition).
Read-queue ticket 07, 2026-09-06. The row asked for challenge.gov’s NOAA listings. There are
none, because there is no longer a challenge.gov: the platform was sunset on 2026-03-30 and the
site now serves a single “content has moved” page. The replacement route, for anyone who comes back
to this: usa.gov/find-active-challenge carries the curated list of active federal challenges,
usa.gov/other-government-challenges names the six agencies that run their own (HHS, DHS, NASA, NIH,
the Army and USGS — NOAA is not among them), and the full historical Challenge.gov corpus was moved
to a GitHub repository, which is off the allowlist and is a lead only. research.noaa.gov answers
403 on every rung of scripts/fetch-page.mjs, including full Chrome headers, while noaa.gov
itself opens; NOAA’s own sitemap (3 pages, 5,930 URLs) carries exactly two prize URLs, both the
2019–2021 Powering the Blue Economy Ocean Observing Prize.
- Action
- create
- Object
- innovation prizes and competitions for NOAA research
- ID
- 1881