USA Today Opinion - DOJ Cuts Will Make You Less Safe
More than 350 grants totaling millions of dollars have been cut from the federal budget, impacting safety in communities across the country
The following opinion piece appeared in USA Today Friday, May 2nd. "I worked for this office under the DOJ. Trump's cuts will make you less safe" is written by Amy L. Solomon, former Assistant Attorney General of the Office of Justice Programs.
Excerpts from the piece are included below.
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The words of the grieving mother are forever seared in my brain: “Do not forget us.”
She was among a group of women who had lost children to gun violence, united in their anguish – and in their commitment to protecting other moms from experiencing the same unimaginable fate. I met her on a trip to Chicago in 2023, when I visited federally funded programs working to interrupt cycles of violence and save lives.
And on April 22, in the first 100 days of the second Trump administration, many of the grants that pay for such violence intervention efforts were eliminated, part of a sweeping cut to federal funding from the Department of Justice Office of Justice Programs (OJP).
Until now, you might not have heard of OJP. It’s the federal office that helps fund your city police department, your county jail and your state prison ‒ as well as many of the innovative crime control and prevention strategies that have helped drive crime rates down from their peaks in the early 1990s.
Belt-tightening is not what’s happening here. Funding termination letters told program providers they were no longer in sync with the new administration’s priorities of “combating violent crime” and “protecting victims of trafficking and sexual assault.”
The proposed cuts will have far-reaching consequences for public safety, victim support, justice system operations and crisis response. Schools may lose critical support to safeguard students, while law enforcement could lose resources to curb violence in rural communities.
Programs designed to interrupt violence, prevent shootings and support evidence-based policing will be forced to scale back or shut down. Efforts targeting sexual assault ‒ including the processing of backlogged kits and improving response strategies ‒ may be cut as well.
There’s never a good time to disinvest in public safety. But these cuts feel particularly ill-timed as our country continues to recover from a painful surge in violent crime during the early COVID-19 pandemic years. By late 2024, violent crime rates had finally fallen to pre-pandemic levels or below, recent findings from the Council on Criminal Justice show, and early numbers from 2025 document continued progress.
With so much at stake, we cannot afford to dismiss the profound costs of promised “savings.” We can and must do better, for the mothers I met in Chicago, and the countless other Americans who have already lost too much.
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You can read the full editorial, "I worked for this office under the DOJ. Trump's cuts will make you less safe" at the USA Today. If paywalled, you can also read it at the Council on Criminal Justice website.
Amy L. Goldman is a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Council on Criminal Justice, and oversaw federal justice grantmaking during her tenure as an US Assistant Attorney General in the Biden administration.
