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.
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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.
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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 does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Politics + Society – The Conversation
