A Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) is a competitive solicitation used by U.S. federal agencies to acquire basic and applied research and that portion of development not related to a specific system or hardware requirement. Unlike a conventional procurement, a BAA does not specify a defined deliverable, a detailed statement of work, or a fixed set of technical specifications the government has already decided on. Instead, it describes an area of scientific or technical interest and invites proposals for how to address it — the offeror, not the government, defines the specific research approach.
The term is frequently mistyped or misremembered as “broad area announcement.” The correct term is Broad Agency Announcement; if you encountered the phrase written the other way, this page covers the same mechanism.
BAAs are used to acquire research through contracts, grants, or cooperative agreements, depending on the issuing agency’s statutory authority, and some defense agencies also use BAA-style calls as the entry point to an Other Transaction (OT) agreement. This flexibility is one of the things that distinguishes a BAA from an ordinary FAR-based procurement, which is normally limited to a contract.
Legal Basis: FAR 6.102(d)(2) and FAR 35.016
The BAA mechanism is grounded in the Federal Acquisition Regulation. FAR 6.102(d)(2) lists the broad agency announcement as one of the competitive procedures an agency may use to satisfy the full-and-open-competition requirement of the Competition in Contracting Act, alongside procedures such as sealed bidding and competitive proposals. FAR 35.016 then prescribes the specific procedures for using a BAA: it is to be used for the acquisition of basic and applied research, and that part of development not related to the development of a specific system or hardware procurement, when meaningful proposals with different technical/scientific approaches can be reasonably anticipated. FAR 35.016 also requires that a BAA describe the agency’s research interest, explain how proposals will be selected, state the evaluation methodology and the relative importance of the evaluation factors, specify a proposal due date (or state that the BAA is open continuously), and give clear proposal-preparation and submission instructions.
Because a BAA satisfies the competition requirement through broad public notice and a genuinely open evaluation process rather than through a formal source-selection process with numerical scoring, it functions differently from an ordinary competitive proposal under FAR Part 15 — a distinction that matters for how a research office should expect a review to actually run (see below).
How a BAA Differs From Other Solicitation Types
A BAA sits alongside several other instruments a research office regularly encounters. The differences are mostly about what’s being acquired (a specific requirement vs. an open research question) and what kind of instrument results (an acquisition/contract vs. a financial-assistance award).
| Instrument | What it’s for | How it differs from a BAA |
|---|---|---|
| NOFO / FOA (Notice/Funding Opportunity Announcement) | Financial assistance — grants and cooperative agreements, typically at NIH, NSF, and other assistance-funding agencies | Governed by 2 CFR 200 assistance rules, not the FAR; the government is not “acquiring” a deliverable for its own use in the same procurement sense. |
| RFP (Request for Proposals) | A defined requirement with a specific statement of work and expected deliverable | The government already knows what it wants built or delivered; offerors compete on how well and how cheaply they can meet a fixed requirement, not on defining the research question itself. |
| RFI (Request for Information) | Market research | No award results from an RFI at all — it exists purely to inform the agency’s later acquisition strategy. |
| SBIR/STTR solicitation | Small Business Innovation Research / Small Business Technology Transfer set-aside funding | Restricted to eligible small businesses (with a university subcontract/partnership role under STTR); runs on a phased, statutorily defined structure rather than the FAR 35.016 process. See CASRAI’s NSF SBIR/STTR guide. |
| Other Transaction (OT) Agreement | Prototype, research, or production agreements outside standard contract/grant law | Uses separate statutory authority (not the FAR) specifically to avoid standard contracting/grant regulations; some agencies use a BAA-style announcement as the public notice mechanism for an eventual OT award. See CASRAI’s Other Transactions Authority guide. |
The distinction that matters most for a research office is the first one: a BAA-resulting contract carries obligations — on deliverables, data rights, cost accounting, and publication — that a grant or cooperative agreement under a NOFO/FOA typically does not carry in the same form. See CASRAI’s Federal Contracts vs. Grants for University Research guide for the broader instrument-type comparison.
Who Issues BAAs
BAAs are most heavily used by mission-driven federal research agencies with basic-and-applied-research budgets, particularly across defense, intelligence, and energy: DARPA, the Office of Naval Research (ONR), the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), the Army Research Office (ARO), the Department of Energy (DOE), the DHS Science and Technology Directorate (S&T), IARPA, and ARPA-H. NIH also runs a small number of continuously open BAAs for specific programmatic needs, though NIH’s dominant solicitation instrument remains the NOFO.
Agencies typically run BAAs in one of two structural forms:
- An open or standing BAA — a continuously open, general-purpose announcement covering an agency’s or office’s broad research interests, accepting white papers or proposals on a rolling basis rather than against a single deadline. DARPA’s individual technical offices and the military-service research offices (ONR, AFRL, ARO) commonly run standing BAAs of this kind.
- A topic-specific call — a BAA issued for a defined program with a specific research goal, technical area(s), and typically a fixed submission deadline, sometimes with multiple submission rounds over the program’s life.
See CASRAI’s DoD Research Funding guide for how DARPA, ONR, AFRL/AFOSR, and ARO fit together as a funding landscape, and the IARPA vs. DARPA comparison for how the intelligence community’s version differs.
The Two-Stage BAA Process
Most BAAs run — and most agencies explicitly recommend — a two-stage process rather than accepting full proposals cold:
- White paper or abstract. A short, non-binding document (often just a few pages) summarizing the proposed technical approach, objectives, and rough cost estimate.
- Agency feedback. The agency reviews the white paper and responds, typically with one of: encouragement to submit a full proposal, discouragement (the idea doesn’t fit current priorities or funding), or specific feedback on how to strengthen an eventual full submission.
- Full proposal by invitation. Only white papers that receive encouragement are generally invited to submit a full technical and cost proposal, which then goes through the agency’s formal evaluation.
Submitting a full, uninvited proposal directly to a BAA is usually wasted institutional effort: full proposals are lengthy, cost-intensive to prepare (technical volume, cost volume, institutional certifications and approvals), and agencies overwhelmingly favor the white-paper-first path both because it is explicitly built into how most BAAs are structured and because it lets a program manager screen for fit before either side invests in a full proposal.
Direct pre-submission contact with the program officer or program manager is expected practice for a BAA in a way it generally is not for NIH or NSF review processes. Because a BAA describes an area of interest rather than a fixed requirement, the program manager plays a much larger role in shaping what actually gets funded, and most agencies explicitly welcome a call or email before a white paper is drafted to confirm fit with current program priorities. See CASRAI’s Program Officer definition for how this role differs across funding mechanisms, and CASRAI’s How to Write a DARPA BAA White Paper guide for a detailed walkthrough of the white-paper stage itself.
What a BAA Proposal Contains, and How Evaluation Differs From Peer Review
A full BAA proposal typically includes a technical volume (approach, objectives, technical risk, milestones/deliverables, team qualifications), a cost volume, and the standard administrative/certification package a sponsored programs office assembles for any federal submission (representations and certifications, institutional signatures, subcontractor/teaming documentation where applicable).
Evaluation differs structurally from the peer-review model researchers are used to at NIH and NSF:
- No study section. There is no standing panel of external scientific peers scoring proposals against each other in a single sitting. Evaluation is typically conducted by government technical/scientific reviewers, often agency program staff, against the criteria stated in the BAA itself.
- Scientific/technical merit plus mission relevance. Proposals are evaluated on scientific and technical merit, but also — often decisively — on relevance to the issuing agency’s mission and current program priorities, which is not a standard NIH/NSF review criterion in the same form.
- Program-officer/program-manager discretion. Because there is no formal ranked competitive pool evaluated all at once in the way an NIH study section produces a percentile score, the program manager has considerably more latitude in shaping funding decisions, sequencing awards, and negotiating scope with an offeror after evaluation.
Contract vs. Grant Implications for the Research Office
Because a BAA can result in a contract, a grant, or a cooperative agreement, the instrument type that actually gets negotiated has real downstream consequences for the sponsored programs and research compliance offices that a NOFO/FOA-funded grant usually does not raise in the same way:
- Deliverables and milestones. A BAA-resulting contract is far more likely than a grant to define specific technical deliverables and milestone-based payment or reporting schedules, closer in structure to a statement-of-work-driven procurement than to a standard grant’s progress-report cadence.
- Data rights and IP. Where Bayh-Dole (see CASRAI’s Bayh-Dole Act definition) governs inventions arising under federal grants and cooperative agreements at universities, a BAA-resulting contract instead triggers FAR/DFARS technical-data and computer-software rights clauses (e.g. DFARS 252.227-7013 for noncommercial technical data), which define categories such as unlimited rights, government purpose rights, and limited/restricted rights rather than following the Bayh-Dole election-of-title framework. Which regime applies depends on the actual instrument awarded, not on the fact that it originated from a BAA — confirm the award type early. CASRAI’s SBIR Data Rights entry illustrates the same category structure in a related, contract-adjacent context.
- Cost accounting. Contracts are more likely to require compliance with FAR cost-principle and cost-accounting expectations (see CASRAI’s FAR Part 31 Contract Cost Principles definition) in a form closer to commercial contracting than the Uniform Guidance (2 CFR 200) cost framework most university grants administrators default to.
- Security and export-control requirements. Defense- and intelligence-agency BAAs, in particular, are more likely to touch export-controlled or classified research, technology-control-plan requirements, and facility/personnel security obligations than an equivalent civilian-agency grant. See CASRAI’s Export-Controlled Research definition.
- Publication-review clauses. Some BAA-resulting awards — especially defense contracts — include a clause requiring agency review, and in some cases approval, before research results are published. This is a genuine institutional risk to flag early: it can conflict with a university’s academic-freedom and open-publication policies, and with the fundamental-research exemption research offices otherwise rely on for export-control purposes. Sponsored programs and research compliance staff should read any publication-review clause before an award is accepted, not after a manuscript is ready to submit.
Because the instrument type is often not settled until negotiation, a research office responding to a BAA should confirm early — ideally as part of pre-submission contact with the program officer — whether the anticipated award will be a contract, grant, cooperative agreement, or OT agreement, since that determines which compliance office, which cost-accounting rules, and which data-rights framework will actually apply. Subrecipients and subcontractors on a BAA-resulting award should also confirm early which set of flow-down terms applies; see CASRAI’s Subaward definition for how flow-down obligations generally work.
Where BAAs Are Posted
BAAs are publicly posted on SAM.gov (System for Award Management, the government-wide contract opportunity posting system — see CASRAI’s SAM.gov definition), and BAAs that will result in a grant or cooperative agreement are also frequently cross-posted on Grants.gov. Many agencies additionally maintain their own BAA listing pages (DARPA’s Opportunities page, ONR’s, AFRL’s, and others), which is often the most current source for a standing/open BAA’s current status and any amendments.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is “broad area announcement” the same thing as a Broad Agency Announcement?
Yes — “broad area announcement” is a common mistyping/mishearing of the correct term, Broad Agency Announcement (BAA). Both phrases refer to the same FAR 35.016 mechanism.
Is a BAA a grant or a contract?
It depends on the issuing agency and the specific award. A BAA is a solicitation mechanism, not an instrument type by itself — it can result in a contract, a grant, a cooperative agreement, or, for some defense agencies, an Other Transaction agreement. Confirm which instrument type applies before assuming grant-style rules (Uniform Guidance, Bayh-Dole) or contract-style rules (FAR cost principles, DFARS data rights) will govern.
Should we submit a full proposal directly to a BAA?
Generally no. Most BAAs expect a short white paper or abstract first, with a full proposal invited only after the agency responds favorably. An uninvited full proposal is usually a poor use of institutional effort compared to the white-paper-first path.
Can universities respond to a BAA?
Yes. BAAs are open to any responsible source, including universities and other nonprofit research institutions, not just industry contractors — though some agency-specific or topic-specific BAAs set eligibility conditions (for example, small-business set-asides) that should be checked before responding.
How is a BAA different from an RFP?
An RFP solicits proposals against a requirement the government has already defined, with a specific statement of work and expected deliverable. A BAA instead describes a broad area of research interest and leaves the offeror to define the specific technical approach, because the government does not yet know exactly what the best solution looks like.
