NSF’s Unqualified Reviewers: What To Do After Your SBIR Proposal Is Declined

I’m not an attorney and the following isn’t legal advice.

After I filed my third National Science Foundation (NSF) Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) proposal, a Program Director called me and said that my project was about to be funded. She emailed me forms to receive the funds. Three months later my proposal was declined.

Thinking that I was this close to getting funded, I hired a grant-writing consultant. We polished my fourth proposal to a high gloss. When it was declined with low marks I was confused. Each of my first three proposals had higher scores than the previous proposal. Aren’t better proposals supposed to get better reviews?

I reread the twelve reviews for the four proposals. The reviews were vague, confused, inconsistent, and lacked actionable items. Some reviewers made comments that no one in my field would say or didn’t know the vocabulary we used. Other reviews looked like the reviewer hadn’t read past the first paragraph. Other reviews cited non-existent rules, as if they hadn’t read the solicitations.

I asked a Program Director for the fields of expertise of the reviewers. I quickly received a response from an Assistant General Counsel telling me not to ask for reviewers’ expertise.

The solicitations specify that

All proposals are carefully reviewed by…experts in the particular fields represented by the proposal.

The Assistant General Counsel said that the reviewers’ qualifications and expertise couldn’t be released under the Privacy Act because I might be able to identify reviewers’ identities.

Over the next few months, the Program Director told me how they select reviewers. He said that they look for “conversational knowledge,” not deep knowledge of a subject. He also said that if they can’t find reviewers with expertise in the fields of a proposal they fall back on the subtopic.

I also asked about the List of Suggested Reviewers page. I’d provided the contact info for a Department of Defense administrator who could find qualified reviewers. I’d also listed potential customers, and then a couple dozen professors and graduate students I’d met at conferences. The Program Director said that they rarely look at Suggested Reviewers.

In other words, the Program Director had a list of qualified reviewers, available for just a call or email, but chose unqualified reviewers instead.

This didn’t sound compliant with the solicitations. I filed a lawsuit asking a judge to order NSF to release reviewers’ expertise.

The lawsuit took three years. NSF fought me every step of the way. I probably spent one thousand hours of my time. The few attorneys who handle federal question jurisdiction—suing the government—bill around $925/hour. This would have been a million-dollar document, if I’d hired an attorney.

Here are the results:

• Linguistics
• Computational Linguistics
• Computer Science & Engineering
• Engineering
• Environmental Sciences
• Engineering Electrical
• Educational Psychology
• Psychology
• Computer Science

Ten other reviewers were listed as “Other Sciences NEC.”

My proposals were in Applied Linguistics, more specifically in the neuroscience of auditory processing and second language acquisition. The Linguist and Computational Linguist were qualified. The other seventeen reviewers—90%—were not.

Academic vs. Commercial Reviewers

None of the nineteen reviewers had commercial experience. A Program Director allowed me to see the database they use to find reviewers. It was almost 100% academics.

SBIR is a program to help startups and small businesses research and commercialize science-based inventions. A grant-writing consultant told me that, for your Letters of Recommendation (three are allowed), letters from potential customers are “gold” and letters from academics are “a dimes a dozen.” Yet Program Directors select only academic reviewers. Why aren’t they soliciting reviews from potential customers?

A Widespread Problem

I asked on Reddit’s r/SBIR whether anyone else had experienced unqualified reviewers.

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My post got comments from other Principal Investigators about their experiences with unqualified reviewers.

I’ve filed a new lawsuit asking a judge to order NSF to vacate the decisions to decline my proposals and to review my proposals with qualified reviewers.

What You Can Do After Your NSF SBIR Proposal Is Declined

You can push back, and it won’t cost you a thousand hours or a million dollars.

Mystery Rules

If reviewers make up non-existent rules, contact the Program Director and request that these reviews be thrown out.

• Several reviewers gave me low marks because I hadn’t provided pilot study data. NSF doesn’t require pilot study data.
• Another review said that SBIR grants cannot fund research — the name of the program is Small Business Innovation Research.
• Another reviewer said that the budget failed to justify the 50% indirect costs and the 7% small business fee. The solicitations explicitly state that no justification is needed for these items.

Program Directors should catch these “mystery rules.” They should train reviewers better. Reviewers should read the solicitations.

FOIA Reviewer’s Qualifications and Expertise

Ask your Program Director to send you the reviewers’ fields of expertise. The NSF FOIA Office decided that reviewers’ expertise is not identifying information and is not covered by the Privacy Act.

If the Program Officer refuses, file an FOIA request for your reviewers’ qualifications and fields of expertise. Cite my FOIA request: NSF FOIA 2025-FOI-00377. The FOIA Office now knows where to find reviewers’ expertise. FOIA requests are free and easy and should be fulfilled in about four months.

If you find unqualified reviewers, tell the Program Director that you want those reviews thrown out.

House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology

The House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology has a Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee. They have a Whistleblower form. I sent them my list of unqualified reviewers. I haven’t heard back yet.

Customer Discovery

Investors want to see, more than anything else, traction with customers. Universities help professors and graduate students who want to commercialize an invention with customer discovery, or getting the Principal Investigators in front of customers, making pitches.

There’s nothing easy or trivial about customer discovery. Decision-makers at large companies don’t want to talk to founders they don’t know at startups they’ve never heard of, who have invented technology they have never imagined. A call from NSF could open doors.

NSF does customer discovery in SBIR Phase III. NSF should provide customer discovery service at each phase, including “Phase 0” or proposal evaluation. NSF would get reviews from real customers—“gold”—instead of academics. Principal Investigators might get orders or investments, even if their proposal isn’t funded.

NSF funds one in three SBIR proposals, currently at $305,000. Let’s say that customer discovery services cost the NSF $3,005 per proposal. Let’s further assume that the result is half of the declined proposals will get orders or investors as a result of customer discovery. By increasing NSF spending 1% we could double the number of funded proposals to two in three.

Is $3,005 too expensive for NSF to spend? Let’s make a rule for Principal Investigators who are associated with a university that their university has to provide customer discovery services to the PI, i.e., require that you have pitched in front of three potential customers before you apply for an SBIR grant. NSF can provide a form for the potential customers to fill out saying whether they recommend the project.

If a PI isn’t associated with a university, NSF provides customer discovery services.

Customer discovery solves the problem of unqualified reviewers by replacing academics with potential customers.

When In Doubt, Sue

If a Program Director refuses to comply with the solicitation, you can file a lawsuit. You can file a lawsuit pro se (without an attorney), without spending a dime. I wrote a book, How To Sue The Government, that tells you how to file a pro se federal question jurisdiction lawsuit.

The federal government has sovereign immunity, except for three enabling statutes: the Administrative Procedures Act (APA), the Tucker Act, and the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA). You can only sue the government under these statutes.

You can file an APA lawsuit asking a judge to vacate the Program Director’s decision and to have your proposal reviewed by qualified reviewers.

What you can’t do under the APA is ask for monetary damages. The APA is only for mandamus relief, that is, asking a judge to order a federal agency to do something or not do something.

Expect an APA lawsuit to take 18 months.

The FTCA is where you ask for monetary compensation for injuries or harm done to you by a federal employee’s actions. The problem here is that not getting a grant doesn’t “sound in tort.” The money was never yours. It’s not like the government took away your property.

Another problem with the FTCA is the “private person” clause. If a federal employee harms you or takes away your property, and you have evidence proving this, there’s nothing you can do unless there’s an analogous state law that allows a tort claim against a private person. For example, if a Postal Service truck hits your car, you can sue the Postal Service because your state laws allow you to file torts against private persons who hit your car. But private persons don’t give away science grants, or, if they do, they’re not required to have experts decide who to give money to.

The Tucker Act is for contracts disputes. If you win a grant but the NSF doesn’t give you the money, maybe you could sue under the Tucker Act. But if your proposal is declined you don’t have a contract.

To repeat what I said above, federal employees can break federal laws and harm you with impunity except in three strictly defined categories. You can’t sue NSF for monetary damages over a declined SBIR proposal even if you have proof that NSF officers didn’t follow their own rules. The best you can hope for is get your proposal reviewed a second time, with qualified reviewers.

Reforms, Part One: Simple, Easy Stuff

1. Specify in the solicitations that the Overview section of the Project Summary, and specifically the Key Words, are the “particular fields of the proposal,” that reviewers will be selected who are experts in these fields, and that Principal Investigators should use care when writing this section to ensure that they get qualified reviewers.

2. Include in reviewer training materials that reviewers are only allowed to review proposals in which they have expertise in the particular fields of the proposals.

3. Reviewers self-rate their expertise on each keyword, not on the overall proposal. (This has to do with self-evaluation of expertise, a subject studied by many psychologists. Self-evaluation of broad or vague skills is not accurate, but accuracy increases when skills are narrowed and specified.)

4. Include with reviews the reviewer’s fields of expertise and their self-rating on each keyword.

5. Include with reviews two buttons for the Principal Investigator to rate the review as “Helpful” or “Not Helpful,” or on a scale of one to five. Send these ratings to reviewers. (Accuracy of self-evaluation of skills increasing when subjects receive feedback.)

6. Include with reviews a button for reporting a non-compliant review. Reasons for reporting a review could include the application of a non-existent rule.

7. Improve the “List of Suggested Reviewers” section of proposals. Ask for a list of potential customers. Ask for contact information for an administrator at an organization who can locate potential reviewers, and whether the Principal Investigator has personal or employment relationships with suggested reviewers.

8. Include at least one reviewer with commercial experience. Specify that commercial expertise in the market for the proposed product is “expertise in the particular fields of the proposal.” E.g., SpaceX could review a proposal for satellite propulsion systems but the founder of a small molecule biotech company couldn’t, even if she has extensive experience working with investors and in entrepreneurial management.

Reforms, Part Two: Tech Accelerators

Tech accelerators such as Y Combinator and Techstars are a vital resource for entrepreneurs. Tech accelerators provide customer discovery services and networking opportunities with investors, as well as mentorship from industry experts, financial planning and legal services, and seed funding. Seed funding is typically equity-based, e.g. Techstars invests $220,000 in return for 5% equity. Returns from investments then funds the accelerator. All this is done in typically three months.

NSF SBIR is like an accelerator broken into pieces, without the pieces working together smoothly. Phase I includes a $305,000 non-equity grant. Phase II is another grant, of about a million dollars. Phase III has no grant but is where startups and small businesses receive customer discovery services, introductions to investors, and other services typical of tech accelerators. This all takes several years.

Can NSF put these pieces together better, more like the tech accelerators? As I said above, provide customer discovery services at all phases, including the proposal stage. Provide the other stuff, such as networking opportunities with investors and legal services, at Phases I and II.

And how about NSF taking 7% equity for a $305,000 investment? This could lead to a self-sustaining, unfunded SBIR program. Or, if Congress prefers to fund SBIR funding, as investments return to the fund, the program could expand to fund half or two-thirds of proposals. And the SBIR program would no longer be subject to government shutdowns or Congressional defunding.