More than half of government funding for gun violence prevention programs in the United States has been terminated by the Trump administration.
This includes $158 million in grants that were previously given to organizations in cities like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, and Baltimore.
According to government data, 69 of the more than $300 million in community violence intervention (CVI) contracts that the U.S. Department of Justice issued in April were abruptly discontinued.
As part of a larger rollback, the department’s Office of Justice Programs, which awards grants, terminated 365 grants totaling $811 million in April, affecting a variety of victim services and public safety initiatives. This includes the removal of CVI programs.
A DOJ official said the gun violence grants were eliminated because they “no longer effectuate the program’s goals or agency’s priorities.”
Thousands of Office of Justice Programs grants are under review, the official said, and are being evaluated, among other things, on how well they support law enforcement and combat violent crime.
In an effort to curb the increase in gun violence in America, former President Joe Biden established the first White House Office for Gun Violence Prevention, and the majority of CVI awards were first financed through the 2022 Bipartisan Safer Communities Act.
Read Also
The majority of state-level funding was used for gun violence prevention initiatives prior to the Biden administration.
Twenty-five of the groups were impacted by funding cuts.
The grants supported a wide range of CVI programming to prevent shootings such as training outreach teams to deescalate and mediate conflict, social workers to connect people to services and employment, and hospital-based programs for gun violence victims.
Gun violence deaths in the U.S. grew more than 50% from 2015 to the pandemic-era peak of 21,383 in 2021, according to the Gun Violence Archive.
Since then, deadly shootings have been in decline, falling to 16,725 in 2024, which is more in line with the pre-pandemic trend.
As of May 2025, deaths are down 866 from the same period last year.
While cities such as New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles received the bulk of gun violence prevention funding, southern cities such as Memphis, Selma, Alabama and Baton Rouge, Louisiana also received millions and were more reliant on the grants due to limited state support for the programs, experts said.
Nearly a dozen interviews with legal experts, gun violence interventionists, and former DOJ officials said funding cuts threaten the long-term sustainability of community violence intervention initiatives that have taken years to establish and are embedded in predominantly Black and Latino communities.
The programs initiated in 2022 marked the first time grassroots organisations could apply for federal community violence prevention funding directly, without going through law enforcement or state intermediaries, according to three former DOJ officials.
