DOJ Funding Cuts: More Than 550 Organizations Impacted, New Analysis Finds

May 2025

Last month, the Trump administration terminated a broad swath of federal safety and justice grants from the Department of Justice’s Office of Justice Programs. As reported in the media and according to original analysis by CCJ, the administration eliminated 373 grants awarded to 221 organizations in 37 states across the country.¹

Originally valued at around $819.7 million, the grants provided federal resources for violence reduction, policing and prosecution, victims’ services, juvenile justice and child protection, substance use and mental health treatment, corrections and reentry, justice system enhancements, research and evaluation, and other public safety activities.

This brief examines the subgrants under these terminated projects. Through subawards, primary grant recipients regrant federal dollars to partner organizations and agencies working collaboratively toward project goals. In some cases, larger national nonprofits subaward funds to smaller organizations that may otherwise face barriers to accessing federal resources, including both rural government agencies and grassroots community-based nonprofits. This approach helps to get resources closer to the ground and to strengthen the overall public safety ecosystem.

According to publicly available information on these grants, approximately one quarter of the terminated OJP grant awards included subawards.² When accounting for both the primary recipients and subrecipients of terminated grants, the analysis shows that:

Terminated grants included subawards to 362 organizations, a small subset of which also lost primary awards of their own (see Appendix A).
This brings the total to 554 organizations in 48 states and territories³ that were affected by OJP funding cuts, more than double the number of primary award recipients alone (see Table 1).
Nonprofits took the largest share of overall funding cuts, accounting for roughly 94% ($769 million) of all terminated OJP dollars.

Table 1. Estimated Organizational Impact of Funding Terminations (including both prime awards and subawards)

Takeaways from this analysis include: (See Table 2)

The terminated grant awards include 473 subawards to 362 organizations originally worth an estimated $72.7 million, or about 9% of the total initial value of the $819.7 million in OJP grants that were cut.
The administration rescinded the remaining balances of terminated OJP awards, which CCJ estimates at around $500 million in lost funding. However, publicly available data sources do not include information on how much of the subaward funding has already been spent down.
Nonprofits lost the largest amount of subaward funding ($49.6 million), followed by state, local, and tribal government agencies ($9.3 million), universities ($7.8 million), and for-profit and other types of organizations ($6.0 million).
Terminated grants included subaward funding for community violence intervention programs, legal assistance for crime victims from underserved communities, court-appointed advocates for children in cases of abuse or neglect, sexual abuse prevention in jails and prisons, services for victims of hate crimes, and other safety and justice initiatives.
Approximately $5 million in subawards were intended for state, local, and tribal law enforcement agencies working to reduce violence in rural areas. Other subawards, worth around $1 million, were for rural jurisdictions to implement cross-sector models for addressing substance misuse and reducing overdose fatalities.
Law enforcement professional associations lost an estimated $3 million in subaward funding.

Table 2. Estimated Impact of Grant Terminations on Subaward Recipients

The deepening federal disinvestment threatens to destabilize the nonprofit sector,⁴ introducing real risks to public safety. Research has documented a causal link between the growth of community- and safety-focused nonprofits and reductions in crime.⁵ A study of crime rates between 1990 and 2012, for example, found that the addition of 10 such nonprofits in a city of 100,000 people translated into a 9% reduction in homicide and a 6% reduction in overall violent crime.⁶

Although the administration has reportedly reversed course and reinstated a handful of select OJP grants, the future of federal public safety funding remains unclear for nonprofits and governments alike.⁷ In the weeks and months to come, CCJ’s Justice in Perspective Series will provide ongoing analysis of the emerging issues and trends that shape public safety and justice nationwide.

Appendix

Appendix A. Number of Prime Award and Subaward Recipients by Organization Type

Appendix B. Subawards Under Terminated OJP Grants

Methodology and Data

Data Quality

The subaward data analyzed in this report was extracted from USASpending.gov and SAM.gov. Subaward data is reported by the prime award recipient, and the federal government has documented issues with subaward data quality (described in detail within the USASpending.gov About the Data module). Although CCJ has taken steps (described below) to mitigate data quality issues, the analysis presented in this report is limited by the completeness and accuracy of publicly available subaward data.

Methodology

The subaward data analyzed in this report was extracted from USASpending.gov and SAM.gov. SAM.gov was queried based on the prime award number of terminated OJP grants, and returned 492 subawards. The awards were de-duplicated, removing any subaward entries that were identical across multiple data fields (subaward recipient name, primary award recipient name, subaward date, subaward amount, and subaward description). A total of 473 subawards remained.

USASpending.gov was queried based on the prime award number of terminated OJP grants and provided data on the address and organization type of subaward recipients. In some instances, a single organization listed different addresses for different subawards; the address for each subaward provided was the one used for this analysis. In other instances, an organization was listed under slightly different names (for example, CASA-THE 11TH JUDICIAL CIRCUIT and CASA OF THE ELEVENTH JUDICIAL CIRCUIT, WV INC.). To the extent possible, these entries were deduplicated based on other identifiers, including entity address, Unique Entity Identifier (UEI) number, Data Universal Numbering System (DUNS) number, subaward ID numbers, and other publicly available information sources.

USASpending.gov did not include data on organization type for a subset of subawards. In these instances, data on organization type was input manually based on publicly available information (e.g., organizations’ websites, financial statements, etc.). Other subawards were not recorded in USASpending.gov; data on location and organization type were identified through publicly available sources.

Both federal databases listed a subaward from the National Policing Institute to the Town of Kent in the amount of $105,124,743, which significantly exceeds the primary award value. The subaward amount was adjusted to $107,777, based on a press release from the Town of Kent Police Department published in local media outlets and confirmation from the primary grantee.

In the interest of transparency and to allow readers to conduct their own analyses of subaward data, CCJ has provided the final dataset used in this analysis in Appendix B. Readers are cautioned that this data may be incomplete or contain errors or duplications, due to the nature and quality of subaward data published by the federal government.

Acknowledgements

Amy L. Solomon and Betsy Pearl co-authored this report, with support from other members of the Council on Criminal Justice team.

Thank you to Brian Edsall, Erik Opsal, and Rachel Yen for their support in the design and communications efforts for this report.

About Justice in Perspective

Justice in Perspective is a nonpartisan series examining the complexities of federal justice funding, policy, research, and operations. It is led by CCJ Senior Fellow Amy L. Solomon, former Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Department of Justice Office of Justice Programs.

Suggested Citation

Solomon, A., & Pearl, B. (2025). DOJ funding cuts: More than 550 organizations impacted, new analysis finds. Council on Criminal Justice. https://counciloncj.org/doj-funding-cuts-more-than-550-organizations-impacted-new-analysis-finds/

Endnotes

¹ Solomon, A., & Pearl, B. (2025). DOJ funding update: A deeper look at the cuts. Council on Criminal Justice. https://counciloncj.org/doj-funding-update-a-deeper-look-at-the-cuts/. Stein, P., Jackman, T., & Roebuck, J. (2025, April 25). DOJ cancels grants for gun-violence and addiction prevention, victim advocacy. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/04/22/justice-department-grants-canceled/

² Of the 373 terminated prime awards, 91 (24.4%) reported at least one subrecipient in SAM.gov. See Methodology and Data section for additional information about data sources and quality.

³Includes the District of Columbia, Guam, and Puerto Rico.

⁴Tomasko, L. (2025, February 21). Government Funding Cuts Put Nonprofits at Risk across the Nation. Urban Institute. https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/government-funding-cuts-put-nonprofits-risk-across-nation

⁵ Jacoby, A. (2017). Social service organizations, discretionary funding, and neighborhood crime rates. Crime & Delinquency, 64(9), 1193–1214. https://doi.org/10.1177/0011128716688884. Sharkey, P., Torrats-Espinosa, G., & Takyar, D. (2017). Community and the Crime Decline: The causal effect of local nonprofits on violent crime. American Sociological Review, 82(6), 1214–1240. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0003122417736289

⁶Sharkey, P., Torrats-Espinosa, G., & Takyar, D. (2017). Community and the Crime Decline: The causal effect of local nonprofits on violent crime. American Sociological Review, 82(6), 1214–1240. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0003122417736289

⁷ Lynch, S., & Eisler, P. (2025, April 24). US Justice Dept grant cuts valued at $811 million, people and records say. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-justice-dept-grant-cuts-valued-811-million-people-familiar-say-2025-04-24/

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