Challenge.gov retired; volunteer project restores daily feed of federal prize competitions

What happened

The U.S. government retired Challenge.gov, the federal portal for prize competitions, on March 30, 2026, according to a post on dev.to. The site's archive was moved into a General Services Administration GitHub repository called challenges-and-prizes, and challenges that are still running now exist as individual pages on USA.gov.

According to the post's author, who publishes as MV2 of Munim, Inc., the new pages ship with no API, feed or export option of any kind. A community scraper that read Challenge.gov's home page stopped working the same day the portal went offline.

A volunteer feed restores structured access

MV2 built federal-prize-feed, an open-source replacement that reads USA.gov's "Browse active challenges" listing and each individual challenge page. The author says the crawler is kept deliberately slow so it respects the 10-second crawl delay the site specifies, and a GitHub Action refreshes the output every day, publishing three files to the repository:

• data/active., with sponsor, opening and closing dates, challenge types, prize information, a parsed cash total, contact details, an application link and current status for every listed challenge
• data/active.csv, the same records in spreadsheet form
• data/deadlines.ics, an all-day calendar event for each closing date, subscribable from Google Calendar, Outlook or Apple Calendar

Because the files sit at stable raw GitHub URLs, scripts and calendar apps can consume them directly, the author writes.

As of October 13, 2026, the listing held 16 challenges with roughly $34.5 million in stated cash prizes. Entries ranged from a Department of Homeland Security biothreat-detection challenge closing October 14 to the Army's xTech|Search 10 competition, which carries a $1 million prize and closes October 19, plus an ACL Caregiver AI Prize that remains open until 2029.

Gaps the feed cannot close

The project documents weaknesses in the official arrangement rather than fixing them. USA.gov labels its listing a selection of challenges, and agencies post others only on their own sites. A sources.md file in the repository tracks those agency pages and flags stale ones; the Department of Health and Human Services' page, for instance, still links to defunct challenge.gov addresses.

NASA maintains its own prize page with entries that do not appear on USA.gov, including the 2026 NASA Space Apps Challenge scheduled for November 14–15.

The author also cautions that phase deadlines inside a challenge frequently fall earlier than its overall end date, so applicants should read the official rules before applying.

The code targets Python 3.8 and above, uses only the standard library, and is MIT licensed. MV2 invites issue reports pointing to other pages that publish federal challenges, and notes that both the code and the post were produced with AI agents working in the author's name, with everything published openly.

Why it matters

Challenge.gov was the single centralised view of which federal agencies were offering prize money and when competitions closed. Replacing it with per-challenge HTML pages turned a machine-readable public dataset into something only a person with a browser can follow, and broke existing tooling on day one. That one volunteer, scraping politely within the site's stated crawl-delay rules, could restore daily JSON, CSV and calendar access shows the data still exists; it is simply no longer offered in a usable form. The gaps that remain — a "select" listing, agency pages pointing at dead URLs, NASA-only competitions — mean complete coverage now depends on volunteer maintenance rather than on the government publishing its own data.