Trump Administration Has Cut Over $1 Billion in Gun Violence and Public Safety Grants Since Taking Office

What Got Cut, and How Much

The Trump administration has terminated, redirected, or delayed more than $1 billion in federal grants related to gun violence, public safety, and mental health since the start of 2025, according to a Trace analysis of data from USASpending.gov, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency database, and other sources.

The largest single block — more than $180 million — supported violence prevention programs in cities including Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Newark, New Jersey. But the cuts were not limited to blue cities. Programs in South Carolina, Louisiana, and Alabama also lost funding, according to The Trace.

Most of those grants were funded through a Justice Department initiative created by the 2022 Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which passed with Republican support and was signed by President Biden. Congress has continued appropriating money for the initiative, but the Trump administration rewrote the eligibility requirements to favor police and immigration enforcement. Community-based nonprofits that ran the violence prevention programs no longer qualify.

Senator Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat who helped sponsor the original law, has objected to the change.

The Research Pipeline Is Also Stalling

Researchers at the Rockefeller Institute of Government in New York were weeks from completing a federally funded mass shooting prevention study when the Trump administration canceled their grant last July. Lead investigator Jaclyn Schildkraut, who directs the Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium, said they had collected nearly 150,000 pages of law enforcement records and were preparing public training materials on early warning signs. The grant cancellation came from the Department of Homeland Security's terrorism prevention office, which eliminated more than a dozen grants in that round.

When DHS issued a press release celebrating the cuts, it highlighted grants to LGBTQ organizations and what it called "woke" diversity programs. The mass shooting research grant was not mentioned. Neither were grants examining domestic terrorism or targeted violence prevention, according to The Trace.

The CDC's Data Infrastructure Took a Direct Hit

In April, roughly 10,000 employees were cut from the Department of Health and Human Services, according to The Trace. That included entire teams at the CDC's Injury Center, which tracks violent deaths, firearm suicides, domestic violence incidents, and unintentional shootings.

The CDC's Division of Violence Prevention lost about three-quarters of its staff in that same period. The division that manages WISQARS — the federal database covering gun deaths and injuries — was largely eliminated, with at least 40 people receiving termination notices, according to Mother Jones. A suicide prevention unit was left largely intact.

A former CDC official told The Trace: "By eliminating the programmatic staff, you've eliminated CDC's ability to take knowledge, apply it, and help communities use it to make a difference."

The ATF's budget was also cut by more than a quarter in Trump's latest spending bill, according to the Center for American Progress. That same bill eliminated the National Firearms Act's $200 tax on short-barreled rifles, shotguns, silencers, and covert guns.

The Case for the Cuts

Supporters of the administration's approach argue that community-based violence prevention grants have inconsistent track records and that federal dollars are better directed toward law enforcement, which has direct accountability for public safety outcomes. They point out that crime did fall significantly since 2023, and that the causal relationship between any specific grant program and those declines is difficult to establish. The shift toward police funding, in this view, is a reallocation based on what demonstrably works, not a retreat from public safety.

That's a defensible policy position. The problem is that the administration's cuts also eliminated the very research infrastructure that would allow anyone to measure whether the new approach is working better or worse than the old one.

Thirty Years of Research Suppression, Then a Brief Window

This isn't the first time federal gun violence research has been choked off. The Dickey Amendment, passed in 1996 at the NRA's urging, redirected CDC research dollars and effectively halted the field for more than two decades. Congressman Jay Dickey himself reversed course years later — days after the Aurora theatre mass shooting, he co-authored an op-ed urging more scientific research, not less. President Obama directed the CDC to resume gun violence research in the months that followed. But funding was slow to follow.

It wasn't until 2021 — after policy changes set in motion by a 2018 bill clarifying that the Dickey Amendment did not prohibit gun violence research — that Congress allocated dedicated federal funds for gun violence research for the first time in 25 years. In 2019, Congress had lifted the de facto ban and begun pouring $25 million per year into the NIH and CDC to study the issue, but the first dedicated funding did not arrive until 2021. By 2025, despite Congress retaining that funding, neither the CDC nor the NIH posted new grant opportunities related to firearms or violence prevention.

Doctors Jessica Beard and Elinore Kaufman, writing in The Guardian, noted that without reliable federal tracking, the U.S. doesn't have a confirmed count of how many people were shot last year, the year before, or this year.

What Comes Next

A Senate bipartisan spending plan for fiscal year 2026 would largely preserve the CDC's budget, according to The Trace. Whether that holds once the bill reaches the House is an open question, and the violence prevention nonprofits that lost Justice Department grants under the new eligibility rules have no clear path back to federal funding under current administration policy regardless of what happens to the CDC budget line.