Trump’s cuts to intervention programs could increase violent crime, experts say

Homicides in the US have fallen dramatically in recent years after a spike during the COVID-19 pandemic, but now some advocates for community violence intervention programs worry federal funding cuts by the Trump administration will reverse that trend.In April 2025, more than $800m in grants was cut from the Department of Justice’s office of justice programs aimed at preventing and responding to gun violence, among other causes.While the justice department justified the cuts by stating that it was instead focusing on “prosecuting criminals”, some experts argue that intervention programs are more effective at reducing violence than simply making arrests.“We saw historic reductions in homicides, which means that countless fewer families had to bury loved ones,” said Shani Buggs, an assistant professor at the University of California, Davis, who studies community violence prevention. “It is beyond disheartening that rather than investing and [studying] what worked and pouring into what worked, we are doing the opposite.”In 2020, when the pandemic started, the US saw its murder rate increase 30% over 2019, the largest-ever recorded increase, according to the FBI. Other violent offenses also increased.That happened because of the Covid lockdown, experts say.“The clearest explanation for why homicide and violence increased so rapidly across the entire country during the pandemic is that large numbers of young men and teen boys in high poverty, higher violence neighborhoods were pushed out of work and out of school,” said Rhett Morris, who co-authored a Brookings Institution report on homicides during the pandemic.Violent crime started to ease during the second half of the Biden administration and the downward trend has continued since Trump took office. In 2025, there were 25% fewer homicides in the US than in 2019, according to a report from the Council on Criminal Justice, a non-partisan thinktank.The New York Police Department also reported that the city saw its fewest murders in recorded history during the first four months of this year.Even though the recent crime drop started under Biden, the Trump administration has portrayed the progress as something that began once he took office and linked it to his deployment of national guard troops to US cities. Trump was also president when violent crime surged in 2020.“This is the direct result of President Trump’s aggressive, no-nonsense approach to public safety,” the White House stated in February. “By surging federal resources to Democrat-run cities that had devolved into war zones, removing savage criminal illegals from our streets, supporting police and prosecutors, and rejecting the Radical Left’s weakness, President Trump’s decisive actions have turned the tide.”But experts dispute those claims, not only because things started getting better before Trump returned, but also because crime dropped significantly in cities like Baltimore, Buffalo and Salt Lake City, where he did not send the national guard. Crime in those cities decreased by more than 40% in 2025 compared with 2019, according to the Council on Criminal Justice.“We have seen significant drops in violent crime in cities without any deployments,” and “we have seen drops in crime in cities that have had the deployments, so it doesn’t seem like that has been a critical factor,” Morris said.In 2022, Biden approved the bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which provided $250m for the community-based violence intervention and prevention initiative. The government then provided grants to organizations such as Baltimore’s LifeBridge Health, which utilized community members to mediate conflicts and prevent shootings, and the Urban Peace Institute in Los Angeles, which trained Black and Latino community members to become violence interrupters.The Trump administration terminated grants worth millions of dollars to Urban Peace, LifeBridge and at least two other Baltimore organizations dedicated to violence intervention, according to Giffords, a gun violence prevention organization.They did so even though Baltimore saw the largest homicide rate decrease between 2019 and 2025 among 35 cities in the Council on Criminal Justice study.The city’s success demonstrates “what happens when you pour resources into a strategic plan that is focused on a really comprehensive approach to public safety”, Buggs said.Still, experts say it is hard to determine why violent crime has dropped so sharply.It could be due to increased government investment in violence intervention programs and infrastructure such as street lighting, as well as “decreasing the strain of Covid”, said Jeff Asher, a data analyst with AH Datalytics.There are “too many explanations to potentially name, and none of it do we know for sure are the major drivers”, Asher said.When the Trump administration made the cuts, the then-attorney general, Pam Bondi, stated that it was eliminating “millions of dollars in wasteful grants”.But it is not clear how much waste or fraud there actually is among grant recipients.In Minneapolis, Zachary Coppola, a resident, sued the city in 2023 for allegedly not following the law in how it awarded government funding to violence prevention organizations.Unlike the national trend, Minneapolis saw its homicide rate increase by 30% in 2025 as compared with 2019. The city has also become a target of the Trump administration because of alleged fraud among its Somali American residents.“I saw what to me was an alarming lack of procedures in how they awarded contracts for these programs,” said Coppola’s attorney, Dean Thomson, a Democrat who believes the Immigrations and Custom Enforcement (ICE) raids in Minneapolis were “horrific and violated all sorts of constitutional rights”.The city ultimately settled and agreed to take measures such as requiring organizations applying for an award to state what services it will provide in “sufficient detail” to allow the city to evaluate them, according to the court document.“A statement that the vendor intends to interrupt violence will be insufficient,” the agreement states.Brian Feintech, a spokesperson for Minneapolis’s office of community safety, stated that the city was complying with the settlement and planned to release an audit of past contracts in June.Minnesota attorney general, Keith Ellison, a Democrat, also earlier this month filed a lawsuit against We Push for Peace, a non-profit that received money from Minneapolis and Whole Foods, among others, for violence interruption and community outreach services.Instead, its directors, Trahern Pollard and Jaclyn McGuigan, allegedly siphoned more than $6.5m from the organization, which did not have any board to provide oversight, for items such as a trip to Las Vegas, child support payments and funding for Pollard’s liquor store and car dealership, according to the complaint.In 2021, a We Push for Peace worker was also caught on camera beating a homeless man outside a grocery store, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune reported.“We believe the state has incorrectly stated the actual facts,” Thomas Brever, Pollard’s attorney, told the Guardian of the lawsuit.Thomson said of Ellison’s action: “What took him so long? All these questions were raised by my lawsuit. They would have been raised by anyone monitoring this program.”Still, there do appear to be many violence intervention success stories, besides what has occurred in Baltimore.For example, in 2020 in San Francisco, the city implemented a violence reduction initiative, which included intensive mentorship and life coaching to people identified as being at high risk for involvement in gun violence. The district where it was implemented saw a 50% reduction in homicides and non-fatal shootings compared with the rest of the city, according to a University of Pennsylvania report.Buggs rejects the Trump administration’s argument that it cut funding to such organizations because they were wasting taxpayer money.“There was no investigation of waste, fraud and abuse before the cuts were made,” Buggs said. “When you’re talking about preventing violence, I would think that our government would want to ensure that we weren’t doing harm first before making these cuts.”