U.S. Violent Crime Plunges to a Century Low — but the Federal Funding That Fueled the Drop Is Vanishing
The United States is seeing one of the steepest declines in violent crime in modern history, with the murder rate dropping to its lowest point in more than a century.
Homicides across 35 major U.S. cities fell 21% in 2025 — 922 fewer people killed. Robberies declined 23%, gun assaults 22%, and carjackings plummeted 43%. Yet the Trump administration has pulled hundreds of millions of dollars from the very programs that helped drive those numbers down.
Andrea Hagan, a scholar at Loyola University New Orleans who studies how policy and structural conditions shape crime in marginalized communities, sees a dangerous pattern forming. “These historic gains are at serious risk if funding doesn’t return,” she said.
In April 2025, the Department of Justice terminated 365 previously awarded grants. Roughly $500 million in promised funds vanished, affecting more than 550 organizations across 48 states. The cuts swept 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,” while the White House argued the programs had been “funding DEI and cultural Marxism” rather than keeping Americans safe. The DOJ’s fiscal 2026 budget proposal further reduces public safety and justice program funds by an additional $850 million — about a 15% decrease from the prior year.
The impact was immediate. The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University found that initiatives implementing a federal law to support ex-inmates with temporary housing, job training, and healthcare lost $40 million. Many of the terminated programs had deep bipartisan roots. Project Safe Neighborhoods, a crime-reduction initiative launched under President George W. Bush in 2001, lost its training funds, according to the Council on Criminal Justice. Also axed was an anti-terrorism program that had trained more than 430,000 state and local law enforcement officers and partners since 1996.
Even modest programs suffered. In rural Oregon, a DOJ grant had allowed the Union County district attorney to hire an investigator who, after probing a 43-year-old cold case involving the killing of a 21-year-old woman, finally developed leads. When the money was cut, the investigation stopped.
The timing could hardly be worse. States and local jurisdictions were already facing looming cuts as billions of dollars from President Joe Biden’s COVID recovery plan expire on Dec. 31, 2026. Many local governments had used that money to build violence prevention programs from scratch: community-based mediators, youth employment initiatives, behavioral health teams.
Now there’s a double funding cliff: sudden cancellation of DOJ grants paired with the expiration of COVID recovery money. In Chicago, that 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.
Criminology research helps explain the risks of abrupt disinvestment. Emory University sociology professor Robert Agnew’s General Strain Theory posits a direct link between increased strain — economic pressure, blocked opportunities, 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, and 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. Baltimore’s LifeBridge Health 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.
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 those services.
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania warn that cuts to violence prevention programs are likely to lead to increases in gun crime. The initiatives now losing funding are the ones that helped drive crime down in many American cities: community members trained in conflict mediation who extinguish tensions before they turn lethal; youth programs that provide alternatives to street economies; forensic labs that process evidence to solve cases; reentry programs that keep people from cycling back through the system. Together they form the infrastructure of public safety.
As funding from two main sources runs out, whether the progress continues depends on what happens next.
This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Andrea Hagan, Loyola University New Orleans
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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.