In an article published by The Conversation, Professor Andrea Hagan argues that homicide rates are dropping across 35 American cities, but despite this decline, the Trump administration is moving hundreds of millions of dollars away from the programs she says were responsible for the reduction in homicides.
In the opinion article, Hagan opens by stating, “The United States is experiencing one of the steepest declines in violent crime in modern history.” She says the current rates in 35 major cities dropped 21% in 2025, which led to 922 fewer homicides. On top of this, “Gun assaults declined 22% [and] carjackings plummeted 43%.”
Hagan says she is a scholar focused on “how policy decisions and structural conditions shape crime in marginalized communities,” and that she sees “a pattern forming that could put these historic gains at serious risk.”
According to Hagan, in April 2025, the Department of Justice “terminated 365 previously awarded grants. About $500 million in promised funds evaporated, affecting more than 550 organizations across 48 states.” These grant cuts affected a large array of public safety fields, including “community violence intervention, victim services, law enforcement training, juvenile justice, offender reentry and criminal justice research.”
The Trump administration, according to Hagan, said the cuts were intended to eliminate “wasteful grants,” and the White House argued that “the grant programs had been ‘funding DEI and cultural Marxism’ rather than helping to keep Americans safe.” This shift is reflected in the DOJ’s 2026 budget proposal, which reduced funding for these programs by $850 million — a 15% decrease from last year.
Hagan says, “On the ground, the effects of the cancellations were immediate.” Initiatives that grant formerly incarcerated people “temporary housing, job training and healthcare lost $40 million in funding.” Hagan further argues that many of these programs had “deep bipartisan roots.”
Project Safe Neighborhoods was a crime reduction initiative launched in 2001 by President George W. Bush. According to Hagan, the program lost its training funding. She adds, “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.”
Hagan says it is not just the large programs being targeted, but also, “More modest programs were targeted as well.” In Oregon, the Union County District Attorney’s Office hired an investigator using a DOJ grant.
Hagan says the investigator, “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.”
Hagan argues, “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.”
Governments used this money to create violence prevention programs “from the ground up: employing community-based mediators, launching youth employment initiatives and expanding behavioral health teams.” Hagan says that now these programs are ending because of a “double funding cliff,” with DOJ grants being cut while Biden-era recovery funding also expires.
Hagan says this double cliff is already affecting Chicago, which is facing a 43% cut to its domestic violence prevention budget, “Even as its share of domestic-related homicides rose 13% over the previous year.”
“Criminology research helps explain the particular risks of abrupt disinvestment,” Hagan says. She correlates this to Robert Agnew’s General Strain Theory, which “identifies a direct relationship between increased strain — economic pressure, blocked opportunities, the withdrawal of institutional support — and higher risks of criminal behavior.”
Professor Hagan also points to past budget cuts, noting that in 2013, spending reductions “eliminated services for more than 955,000 crime victims in a single year.” She adds that because of those cuts, violent crime rates grew by 7% between 2014 and 2016. The cuts being faced in 2025, Hagan says, are “substantially larger and more targeted, and have devastated some groups.”
Those groups include Equal Justice USA and LifeBridge Health’s Center for Hope. Each lost $3 million and $1.2 million, respectively, due to DOJ grant cuts. Equal Justice USA was forced to shut down because of the $3 million loss, while LifeBridge could no longer provide therapy to gun violence survivors.
Hagan states, “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.” She says this comes after the DOJ allowed more than 100 grants for survivors of human trafficking to expire, affecting “more than 5,000 victims, despite Congress allocating $88 million for these services.”
In her final statement, Professor Andrea Hagan argues, “Community members trained in conflict mediation… Youth programs… Forensic labs… Reentry programs [that] keep people from cycling back through the system” all function as public safety infrastructure. However, “As funding for crime prevention from two main sources runs out, whether progress continues depends on what happens next.”
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