Violent Crime In The US Is At Record Lows, But The DOJ Is Eliminating The Funding That Helped Reduce Crime
from the it's-almost-as-if-they-want-more-crime dept
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
The United States is experiencing one of the steepest declines in violent crime in modern history, including a murder rate at its lowest point in more than a century.
Homicides across 35 major American cities fell 21% in 2025, amounting to 922 fewer people killed. Robberies dropped 23%. Gun assaults declined 22%. Carjackings plummeted 43%.
Yet the Trump administration has yanked hundreds of millions of dollars from the programs that helped make those numbers possible.
As a scholar focused on how policy decisions and structural conditions shape crime in marginalized communities, I see a pattern forming that could put these historic gains at serious risk.
‘Wasteful grants’
In April 2025, the Department of Justice terminated 365 previously awarded grants. About US$500 million in promised funds evaporated, affecting more than 550 organizations across 48 states.
The cuts stretched across the public safety landscape: community violence intervention, victim services, law enforcement training, juvenile justice, offender reentry and criminal justice research.
Then-Attorney General Pam Bondi described the cancellations as eliminating “wasteful grants.” The White House argued that the grant programs had been “funding DEI and cultural Marxism” rather than helping to keep Americans safe.
The DOJ’s fiscal year 2026 budget proposal reduces the pool of funds for public safety and justice programs by an additional $850 million – about a 15% decrease from the prior year.
Bipartisan programs
On the ground, the effects of the cancellations were immediate.
Initiatives implementing a federal law to support ex-inmates with temporary housing, job training and healthcare lost $40 million in funding, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York Unversity.
Many of the terminated programs had deep bipartisan roots.
Project Safe Neighborhoods, a crime-reduction initiative launched in 2001 under President George W. Bush, lost its training funds, the Council on Criminal Justice found. Also axed was an anti-terrorism program that had trained more than 430,000 state and local law enforcement officers and other partners since 1996.
More modest programs were targeted as well.
In rural Oregon, a DOJ grant had allowed the Union County district attorney to hire an investigator who, after a few years of probing a 43-year-old cold case involving the killing of a 21-year-old woman, finally developed some leads. When the money was cut, the investigation stopped.
Funding cliffs
The funding cuts couldn’t have come at a worse time. States and local jurisdictions were already facing looming cuts, as billions of dollars provided by President Joe Biden’s COVID recovery plan run out on Dec. 31, 2026.
Many local governments had used that money to build violence prevention programs from the ground up: employing community-based mediators, launching youth employment initiatives and expanding behavioral health teams.
And now? A double funding cliff with the sudden cancellation of DOJ grants, paired with the expiration of COVID recovery money.
In Chicago, this cliff has already forced a 43% cut to the city’s domestic violence prevention budget for 2026 – even as its share of domestic-related homicides rose 13% over the previous year.
Larger and more targeted
Criminology research helps explain the particular risks of abrupt disinvestment. Emory sociology professor Robert Agnew’s General Strain Theory identifies a direct relationship between increased strain – economic pressure, blocked opportunities, the withdrawal of institutional support – and higher risks of criminal behavior.
Historical precedent reinforces the concern. In 2013, federal across-the-board spending cuts eliminated services for more than 955,000 crime victims in a single year. The capacity of the FBI and related agencies was slashed by the equivalent of more than 1,000 agents.
Between 2014 and 2016, the violent crime rate climbed 7%.
The 2025 cuts are substantially larger and more targeted, and have devastated some groups.
Equal Justice USA, a national organization working to end the death penalty and reduce violence through community-based interventions, shut down in August 2025 after losing more than $3 million in DOJ grants.
Local programs like Baltimore’s LifeBridge Health’s Center for Hope lost $1.2 million to provide therapy for gun violence survivors.
“What shocked me the most … was what feels like the utter cruelty of it,” said Adam Rosenberg, who runs the center, referring to the cancellation of the funds.
As of April 2026, the DOJ has not paid out $200 million in approved grants to assist victims of domestic violence, sexual assault and human trafficking.
This comes after the department last year allowed more than 100 grants for human trafficking survivors to expire, affecting more than 5,000 victims, despite Congress allocating $88 million for these services.
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania warn that cuts to violence prevention programs are likely to lead to increases in gun crime.
What happens next
The initiatives now losing funding are the ones that helped drive crime down in many American cities.
Community members trained in conflict mediation help extinguish tensions before they turn lethal. Youth programs provide alternatives to street economies. Forensic labs process the evidence that solves cases. Reentry programs keep people from cycling back through the system. With each serving a distinct function, together they form the infrastructure of public safety.
As funding for crime prevention from two main sources runs out, whether progress continues depends on what happens next.
Andrea Hagan is Instructor of Criminology & Justice at Loyola University New Orleans
Filed Under: crime, crime prevention, doj, donald trump, grants, pam bondi, violent crime
Comments on “Violent Crime In The US Is At Record Lows, But The DOJ Is Eliminating The Funding That Helped Reduce Crime”
He’s probably thinking that if he can remove funding and grants violent crime will escalate before November and then attempt to make a run for declaring martial law?
Re:
Or more likely: Trump doesn’t beiieve in insurance or repairing.
By letting crime get worse it creates a situation where a politician can sell “tough on crime” again.
Starting a program is an easy sell for politicians, while keeping a functioning program going is killing the budget and the good media coverage from handing out money…
I want a recount
Need to know the Data from the previous Records. AND verify these.
Law Enforcement is not about reducing crime
For this administration (and to be fair, prior administrations, especially the Republican ones) law enforcement doesn’t exist to reduce crime, but to preserve hierarchy and to keep workers and minorities in their place.
The Orange Orangutan wants more criminals so he can send in the military.
My grandmother had high blood pressure which was managed through medication. For a long time, things would be fine, then it would increase. When it was up he’d prescribe a higher dose which has side effects but bp would be fine for while, then again increase. Repeat. Until one day I picked up her new refill and discovered she had lots of meds left.
Turns out when her bp was stable, she stopped taking the meds but didn’t tell the doctor ‘cos she felt fine. It was really hard to convince her that she felt good ‘cos of the meds and if she just kept on the low dose she’d have no side effects and bp would stay OK.
Can anyone draw any parallels?
Re: But I feel fine!
This is a common problem with some psychiatric patients, especially observable with the patent’s symptoms can get dangerous. (Bi-Polar Disorder and Borderline Personality Disorder are notable cases.)
Some patients take their meds for a while, feel better and then stop taking them because they’re asymptomatic. Which leads to the symptoms coming back, sometimes leading to the patient going on a drama rampage sometimes involving lethal weapons or heavy machinery.
Cited data contradicts articles conclusion
For all how much I despise this
juntagovernment, this article lacks scientific rigor.As a devil’s advocate I’d summarize this article like this: In the first year of Trump’s presidency crime fell by the largest single-year percentage drop in the homicide rate on record; at the same time Trump saved hundred of millions of USD
This is underpinned by two significant data points
– crime declined at record levels after the ICE raids started (see below)
– crime increased substantially after reducing punitive actions – the 7% raising of crime rates between 2014 and 2016 after by slashing the FBI
The thesis this article here promotes is that In the longer run, preventive measures reduce crime substantially more than punitive action.
Indicators that would strengthen this thesis would be
– after starting preventive action, crime rate would gradually go down
– a (longer) delay between action and effect because less people become criminals in the first place. Becoming a criminal can be assumed to be a slower process. After all, most don’t rob someone the same day they lose their job or home; they start doing crime after all other options are exhausted. Therefore a delay is expected.
– Crime sharply raises after punitive action is reduced
For this I’d like to see some long term observation and at least some correlation between preventive action and reduced crime rate that can be explained by the thesis above. Before even starting to imply some causality, I’d also like to see the opposite: Stopping preventive action will gradually raise crime rate.
Sources
If you’re an advocacy group and so much of your funding depends on federal government grants that you need to shut down entirely if you lose them, that means the federal grants were funding the advocacy. The federal government should not be spending money telling the states whether or not they should have a death penalty.
If the Union County (or the state of Oregon) doesn’t think this is enough of a priority to fund it themselves, why should the federal government?
The federal government does not have the responsibility or power to investigate murder cases, or to reduce crime in general. That is for the states. The federal government should not be in the business of giving out grants, to either states or private organizations, for things which are not its responsibility or power. The federal budget is not meant to be a huge slush fund just because so much money goes through it that a million here and a billion these seems like a small amount. I would be saying this even if the federal government was not horribly in debt, which it is.
Well, OK, terrorism is a federal crime so the federal government can, constitutionally, get involved here. But the program is 30 years old and cumulatively hundreds of millions has been spent on it. How many terrorist attacks has it prevented? If the answer is zero, shouldn’t we get rid of it?