Attorney General Pam Bondi claimed that direct services for survivors would not be affected by recent grant cancelations, but advocates say that’s not true.Evan Vucci/AP
On Tuesday night, Claire Ponder Selib, executive director of the National Organization for Victim Assistance (NOVA), received an email from the Office of Justice Programs at the Department of Justice (DOJ) that left her devastated.
The message informed her that a federal grant that supported a pilot program to train victim advocates who staff domestic violence shelters, hotlines and rape crisis centers was being cut. The program, called the Victim Advocacy Corps, began in 2022 and selected 15 students from six colleges and universities that serve minority populations to take part in a year-long, paid fellowship at local organizations, including campus-based sexual assault programs, domestic violence agencies and family justice centers. The DOJ notice claimed the grant “no longer effectuates Department priorities,” which it said were focused on “more directly supporting certain law enforcement operations” and “combatting violent crime.”
To Selib, this rationale made no sense. “Our victim advocacy corps members are providing direct victims services in communities across the country,” she told me by phone on Thursday afternoon. “Cutting these programs puts victims at risk and cuts essential lifesaving services.”
The pilot program also aimed to solve turnover among advocates caused by low pay and an uptick in domestic violence that experts attribute to the pandemic and new abortion restrictions. “I would say quite frankly that our workforce is in crisis,” Selib said. “Our goal with this program was to create a pipeline for the new generation of victim advocates.” Selib had hoped the program would eventually expand nationwide.
Selib’s grant was one of hundreds the DOJ reportedly canceled on Tuesday that supported victims of gun violence, addiction, and domestic violence. According to Reuters, the canceled grants were valued at more than $800 million when they were awarded. In a post on X, Attorney General Pam Bondi bragged about the cuts, alleging the grants were “wasteful” and highlighting a few examples that supported LGBTQ people. She told the Washington Post she has been “a lifelong advocate for victims of crimes against women” and claimed she “will continue to ensure that services for victims are not impacted.”
But experts say that the grant cancelations will, in fact, be particularly devastating for survivors of domestic and sexual violence, who tend to be mostly women and LGBTQ people. These anticipated outcomes are a far cry from Trump’s campaign trail pledge to “protect women” if re-elected and to offer “unending support to every victim of crime” per a proclamation Trump issued for National Crime Victims’ Rights Week earlier this month. (Spokespeople for the Department of Justice and the White House did not immediately return requests for comment from Mother Jones.)
Hundreds of state and national organizations focused on combatting domestic and sexual violence have drafted a letter they plan to send to Bondi, requesting assurance that those services will continue to be funded. “Local, state, and national service providers have been anguished and panicked to receive recent notices terminating their federal grants,” they write. “The terminations of grants, programmatic restructuring, loss of staff, disappearance of [funding opportunities], and lack of communication from DOJ to the field are causing grave insecurity and alarm across the nation” for providers, the draft adds.
Stephanie Love-Patterson, president and CEO of the National Network to End Domestic Violence (NNEDV), said in a statement that the latest cuts “will have devastating, real-life consequences for survivors and their children.” Love-Patterson’s organization provided free legal information for victims, including via an email hotline, for more than 25 years. Its website offers state-by-state information on divorce, custody, and child support laws and its hotline served nearly 6,300 survivors in both English and Spanish last year. Much of that work was funded by a $2 million grant dispersed over three years. On Tuesday, Love-Patterson learned that the remainder of the grant, about a half million dollars, was cut.
A spokesperson said the organization aims to keep services afloat using its other funds, but they will wind up being “drastically reduced.”
The National Center for Victims of Crime (NCVC) announced that it lost a $2.8 million grant Tuesday that will force it to indefinitely close its VictimConnect Resource Center, a helpline that provides emotional and logistical support. Last year, the helpline supported more than 16,000 victims, according to the organization. “We’re shocked that an administration that claims to care about protecting victims would leave so many vulnerable Americans without access to an essential lifeline,” Renée Williams, the organization’s CEO, said in a statement.
The group also lost a grant to build peer-support group programs for crime victims around the country and another grant the team used to create a resource guide for lawmakers.
Crystal Justice, chief external affairs officer of The National Domestic Violence Hotline, noted that many organizations that received termination notices were already underfunded, and that the Hotline is anticipating a surge in calls due to the cuts. “Reduction in services and support for victims means more women, men and children will be harmed,” Justice said.
It appears that Bondi has sympathy for some victims, though. The DOJ reversed some cancelations of grants for shelters working to accommodate survivors’ pets, NBC News reported. (Many shelters do not allow pets, which can prevent survivors from leaving their abusers.)
About 24 hours after Jennifer Pollitt Hill, executive director of the Maryland Network Against Domestic Violence, received a notice Tuesday night that a grant to help local shelters support pets would be canceled, she got word she would get to keep the funds. Then a third, more personal note arrived, from Maureen Henneberg, deputy assistant attorney general at the DOJ. That note said shelters supporting pets were “critical..to broadening the safety net for survivors,” and said that Bondi “personally extends her appreciation” to the Maryland Network Against Domestic Violence. “Our understanding is that all the pets grants were reinstated as it is a passion area for the AG,” Pollitt Hill told me.
The most recent round of cuts are the latest challenge facing domestic and sexual violence service providers across the country. Earlier this month, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s purge of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) led to the elimination of the team working on efforts to prevent sexual and intimate partner violence in the Division of Violence Prevention, as my colleague Kiera Butler reported. The steady depletion of a critical pot of money for providers has also put lifesaving services for survivors in peril long before Trump resumed office, I reported last year.
Even more devastation could be coming. In February, the DOJ’s Office of Violence Against Women scrubbed funding opportunities from its website, leading advocates to worry that those funds could also be cut. More than 100 House lawmakers drafted a letter they plan to send to Bondi on Thursday requesting the DOJ “clarify the status of these grants as soon as possible and take swift action to ensure funding remains available to support survivors and the organizations that serve them,” NBC News first reported.
Selib, who oversaw the pilot program of young victim advocates, is also worried.
“When we cut these services,” she said, “frankly, all Americans are at risk.”
Correction, April 24: A previous version of this story misreported the name of Attorney General Pam Bondi.