Nicole Scott was driving when the call came. It was supposed to be good news. Four months earlier, her small nonprofit, The BRidge Agency, was awarded a federal grant to expand programming to reduce violence in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Recognition, finally, for a decade of grassroots work keeping Black youth out of jail, away from violence and in school. But the voice on the other end was not calling to celebrate.
The money was gone — the grant had been cancelled with zero warning.
“I had to pull over on the side of the road,” Scott said. “I took sick [leave] for a week, and then I just had to regroup, talk to my counselor, talk to my personal therapist.”
Scott’s nonprofit had built its plan for the year around that money — $250,000 to hire youth mentors, pay stipends to kids in its summer leadership academies, even send a few to Louisiana's state capitol, to see what political futures might look like for kids who have grown up stuck in a cycle of violence. Now, with 80% of its funding slashed, there was nothing left but volunteers, prayer and exhaustion in a state that incarcerates youth at double the national average.
The Baton Rouge nonprofit was one of the more than 500 organizations impacted when the Department of Justice abruptly terminated hundreds of grants in late April. This pulled the plug on an estimated half a billion dollars in outstanding funds administered by the department’s Office of Justice Programs (OJP), an analysis by The Council on Criminal Justice found.
The cuts have caused chaos in criminal justice grantmaking, creating a perception that the process is increasingly aligned with President Donald Trump and the Project 2025 agenda — even as some decisions contradict the administration’s own stated goals.
“We have seen the Department of Justice weaponized to be in service of President Trump's political agenda and weaponized to go after his opponents and critics and enemies,” Insha Rahman, vice president of advocacy and partnerships at the Vera Institute of Justice, said.
DOJ funding under the second Trump administration now serves the president’s agenda of mass deportation and a “law and order” approach to reducing crime, Rahman said. The DOJ terminated $5 million in outstanding funds to Vera, who, for 64 years, has run on a platform of criminal justice reform achieved by research. Rahman said the nonprofit had unwavering support from the federal government in the past. Now, Vera is among those organizations that sued to reinstate the funding.
In addition to grassroots anti-violence nonprofits, local police departments, prosecutors and courts, state departments of corrections, national criminal justice nonprofits and researchers had to pause or scale back programs, find other sources of funding, leave positions open or lay off staff. Equal Justice USA (EJUSA), a national nonprofit whose work included funding grassroots organizations supporting victims of violent crime or working to prevent violence also shut down.
“The opportunity to support a President’s agenda may be greater through OJP grant funding than it is through any of the federal government’s other grant-making components,” Gene Hamilton, a DOJ official during Trump’s first administration, wrote in the chapter about the department in Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership.
Since its creation in 1984, OJP has aimed to make the federal government a major supporter of state and local governments’ efforts to reduce crime, often through research, evaluation and development — and grants to encourage new programs, or to support promising models. The office is responsible for grants that transfer billions of federal dollars to state and local agencies making up the criminal justice system, as well as research and nonprofit organizations.
OJP provides site-based grants, which fund local governments or nonprofits to implement programs in particular places, research grants to study the effectiveness of programs, as well as training and technical assistance grants that share expertise to help local programs best use their funding. Training and technical assistance grants, often to national nonprofits like EJUSA or Vera, were the hardest hit in the April cuts. They accounted for more than $578 million in original funds, the Council on Criminal Justice found.
The Justice Department told grant recipients that were terminated that their work “no longer effectuates the program goals or agency priorities.” A termination letter reviewed by The Marshall Project said the department was focusing on direct support and coordination for law enforcement, “combatting violent crime”, “protecting American children,” and supporting victims of trafficking and sexual assault.
However, many of the grant cuts were in these areas. While police departments were not the primary recipients of terminated grants, the Justice Department ended grants aimed at supporting police. The department ended a grant that expanded police officer safety wellness training as part of a broader police mental health and wellness initiative. It also terminated a training and technical assistance grant to help rural law enforcement agencies implement plans to reduce violence. Beyond technical assistance, that grant also funded a few small, focused agency programs to confront violent crime problems.
Outside of law enforcement efforts, community violence intervention programs were hard hit — nearly half of all grants in this area were terminated, a Reuters analysis found.
The department pulled training and technical assistance funds for children’s advocacy centers that respond to child abuse and neglect. At the same time, it ended support for a program that offered victims of domestic violence and sexual assault help finding jobs, counseling, and support groups in Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim, South Asian communities, and one that would have updated a toolkit for responding to transgender victims of sexual assault.
The Justice Department did not respond to The Marshall Project’s request for more details about its reasoning for terminating grants.
Moms on a Mission in Shreveport, Louisiana, is a group that’s focused on supporting victims of violent crime — something Trump has said should be a priority since at least his first term.
Martha Tyler founded the nonprofit in 2022, after she said she felt powerless against the constant cycle of grief induced by the gun violence in her community. The $250,000 grant, which came through EJUSA, was transformational. It helped expand grief support groups, cover rent at a local church hall for meetings and pay trauma counselors. By April, the funding had been cut off — Tyler had only received three months of payments.
With gun violence always in the background, 100 mothers now receive services from the organization, with 50 more on the waiting list. “We have a shooting every day or every other day,” Tyler said. “It’s horrific.”
The phone still rings, showing no signs of stopping after the money has run out. “It’s not like we weren’t doing what we were supposed to do with the money,” Tyler said. “We were boots on the ground here. We do the work.”
For mothers like Belinda Gray, Moms on a Mission has become a lifeline. Gray first saw the group on Facebook after her son had been killed. She scrolled past the posts, suspicious.
Gray had known Tyler from high school. “I saw Martha had this thing, some ‘Moms on a Mission,’” Gray recalled scoffing. “What’s she doing here with this stuff? Talking about people killing people. I don’t want to hear that.”
Tyler messaged Gray on Facebook; she had heard about Gray’s son’s passing and was eventually able to convince her to stop by one of their grief support meetings. Gray said she wanted to just sit in the back and listen. But at her first meeting, Gray was moved by her faith to speak and was embraced by the other mothers. “[Their] arms was carrying burdens like me,” she said. “They knew how I felt, and I could feel the love and the energy.”
Tyler still has big plans for Moms on a Mission. She believes the nonprofit benefits the community beyond grief counseling and that its work can prevent more violence. When young people attend the organization’s grief support meetings, they are taught conflict resolution. Tyler believes that by addressing victims, they can stop the cycle she calls “You kill me, I kill yours,” in a city where solving homicides is rare.
The April termination letters offered grant recipients the opportunity to appeal, and some organizations were able to have their money restored. Others have sought relief through the courts.
In an early June declaration in the lawsuit brought by Vera and four other organizations, Maureen Henneberg from the OJP said her office restored 14 grants shortly after the April revocations. Of the 225 awards that recipients appealed, Henneberg said the department had so far sustained three and denied one, while the rest remain pending.
The OJP and DOJ did not respond to a request for more details about the restored grants.
In Savannah, Georgia, Kate Blair, executive director of Brightside Child and Family Advocacy, said she was already stretched thin when the cuts came. Her organization is a partner of the National CASA GAL, an organization that provides youth with advocates in the court system, and has been awarded more than $48 million spread across three grants.
Blair said Brightside, which houses one of Georgia’s largest CASA programs, strives to prevent child abuse and neglect with its after-school program, court-mandated visitation space, and at-risk youth mentorship program. Blair shared that subgrantees like herself had been advised by the national CASA organization to review their award grants’ language for words that might have been flagged by the Trump administration following his inauguration. The grant’s mention of an HBCU partnership was rewritten to avoid any of the Trump administration’s previous attacks on DEI.
Blair had started rolling out a pilot program to incentivize CASA volunteers who were already overwhelmed by their number of cases. The program was aimed at hiring more men and people of color to be CASA volunteers. Brianna Boyd, a CASA volunteer with Brightside, said the incentive program had already greatly diversified the volunteers of the largely Black and Latino foster care population in Chatham County.
On Aug. 7, National CASA GAL notified its subgrantees that their grants had been restored by the OJP. However, this leaves Brightside unable to extend its grant or backfill for the pause of award money from April to now. With only a fraction of the $100,000 grant expected to come through, Blair said Brightside will ultimately fail to meet its goals.
All three subgrantees echoed the same sentiment — even when the money has run dry, the work must continue. As vital parts of their communities, the organizations have all turned to their community members for help. The BRidge Agency, Moms on a Mission and Brightside have continued to rally the monetary support of the very communities they set out to change.
In early July, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta ruled on a motion to dismiss the lawsuit brought by Vera and the other organizations, calling the Justice Department’s rescinding of the awards “arbitrary” and “shameful.”
“It is likely to harm communities and individuals vulnerable to crime and violence. No federal agency, especially the Department of Justice, should conduct itself in such a manner,” Mehta wrote in his opinion.
However, the court did not have jurisdiction over the case, Mehta acknowledged. He dismissed the case and denied the organizations’ request for an injunction blocking the grant terminations. The organizations have appealed.
Prior to the lower court’s decision, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi opened up another, more political, avenue for restoring grants as she testified before a House subcommittee about the president’s budget request for the department. In her testimony, she said the department had restored 13 grants after people reached out to her.
“If you have, on either side of the aisle, any grants that you believe should be back on, I would love to meet with you and work with you on that,” Bondi said.
While the grant terminations pulled funds from programs focused on rural communities far from the cities Trump has singled out for surges in federal enforcement, as well as programs popular with police or prosecutors, many cuts reflect the administration’s willingness to withhold federal funding to advance its vision for the criminal justice system.
It’s common for a new administration to steer funding to its priorities, but this is typically through new budgets and solicitations, not cutting off existing grants midstream.
Rahman, the Vera vice president, said the organization has received federal funding across Democratic and Republican administrations, including during Trump’s first term.
“I’d say all of us, no matter which part of the federal government you’re working with, have seen a change that’s night and day from Trump 1.0 to Trump 2.0,” Rahman said.
The Justice Department ended a grant to the Washington State Department of Corrections through a program for reducing sexual assault under the Prison Rape Elimination Act. The grant would have funded a position to manage policies and staff training to address transgender people in the state’s prisons. In a prelude to the slew of cuts to OJP grants, the Justice Department withdrew funds from the Maine Department of Corrections over its policies for incarcerating transgender people.
A Marshall Project analysis of the grants terminated in late April found that more than 9% of grant descriptions mentioned phrases related to gender identity or sexual orientation and over 40% of grant descriptions mentioned ones related to race, ethnicity or immigration status.
The cuts to OJP grants included cuts to Project Safe Neighborhoods, a longstanding partnership between local and federal law enforcement and prosecutors that often uses federal prosecution for gun charges to attempt to deter violence. The partnership has a large research component aimed at evaluating and sharing the ways different communities carry out the program. While the administration pulled funds for local violence intervention groups working with the program as well as national technical assistance providers, the president’s proposed 2026 budget doubles funding for Project Safe Neighborhoods, as it reorients the program to immigration enforcement.
Trump’s tax and policy bill, passed in July, prohibits using Byrne Justice Assistance Grant funding for violence prevention, resisting recent calls to use the funds for measures like community violence interruption in addition to enforcement efforts it has traditionally funded.
Since the April cuts, OJP has only announced new funding opportunities supporting programs for victims of crime. The notices say that a program will not be funded if it “directly or indirectly, violates … federal immigration law or impedes or hinders the enforcement of federal immigration law.” In August, state attorneys general sued the Justice Department over these restrictions. The administration, they said, is using the funds for crime victims to force states into assisting the federal government's push to arrest, detain and deport immigrants.
"It definitely seems more politicized now," Kara Davis, the district attorney for Wasco County, Oregon, said. Oregon counties, particularly rural ones like Wasco, rely heavily on grants, to pay for victim services, like advocates who help crime victims understand the justice system, notify them about updates in their cases and accompany them to difficult hearings. The advocates also participate in teams responsible for sharing information about reports of child abuse, elder abuse and crimes where people with disabilities are victims.
The funding includes federal dollars authorized under the Victims of Crime Act that are passed from OJP through the state of Oregon. Davis said her office now faces losing 80% of their grants and, in order to avoid layoffs, can no longer hire an additional person to help work with victims. “Everybody is struggling. It was very sudden,” Davis said.
