Weeks into President Donald Trump’s second term, he stood in front of a room full of police and prosecutors and vowed to make good on promises to “restore law and order” and protect officers from the “radical left,” who Trump said wanted to destroy them “for taking strong actions on crime.”
“With me in the White House,” he said in his March 14 address, “you once again have a president who will always have your back.”
Two weeks later, in one fell swoop, Trump’s Department of Justice slashed an estimated $500 million in federal funding to programs to help local and state justice initiatives, including policing, crime prevention, victim services and juvenile justice. The grants varied in size from $50,000 to nearly $30 million and included efforts ranging from a community policing program to work with teens in Houston to money for an extra investigator to help prosecutors in Oregon go after fentanyl dealers.
The cuts have emerged as one of the most glaring tensions between Trump’s rhetoric and his actions on law enforcement in the first six months of his second term. But it’s far from the only one. The result has been a complicated relationship with law enforcement groups, some of whom say the president’s actions have at times been contradictory.
Just this week, for example, the Trump administration protected the union contract for more than 4,000 Veterans Affairs police, firefighters and security guards, while canceling the contracts of almost all other workers’ unions in the agency. But on the same day, Trump threatened a federal takeover of Washington D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department.
“The consensus from people who have expressed their opinions to me is that he’s talking out of both sides of his mouth,” said Ashley Heiberger, a policing professor at Moravian University and a 22-year police veteran.
The disconnect began on Inauguration Day, when Trump pardoned more than 1,000 people convicted in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, including hundreds who were guilty of assaulting police, calling the rioters “hostages.” Many police unions and professional organizations criticized the move, saying Trump was putting police in danger by absolving people who had attacked officers. “Those convicted of [killing or assaulting] law enforcement officers should serve their full sentences,” said the national Fraternal Order of Police, along with the International Association of Police Chiefs, in a joint statement.
Since then, however, Trump and his Department of Justice have held themselves out as the protectors of state and local police, backing away from civil rights investigations involving at least a dozen police agencies. And police unions applauded an executive order Trump issued in April that promised, among other things, free legal representation for law enforcement agents accused of crimes in the line of duty and more local law enforcement access to military weapons and equipment.
More recently, Attorney General Pam Bondi’s office recommended a one-day sentence — with that time already served — for Brett Hankison, one of the officers involved in the 2020 shooting death of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky. Legal experts described the move as unprecedented because the recommendation was far below the sentencing guidelines. The judge in the case ultimately sentenced Hankison to 33 months in prison.
In June, leaders from the nation’s largest police union also praised the temporary tax cut on overtime pay in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, saying that it will help with police recruitment and retention, because overtime is an important part of compensation for many officers. The overtime tax cut lasts through 2028, according to the IRS.
But in other realms, Trump’s promises on cutting federal funding and his allegiance to his political allies has cut against the cozy relationship with police.
The administration and leaders of some of the nation’s 18,000 law enforcement agencies — particularly those in large, diverse cities — have clashed on issues like immigration enforcement and the Department of Justice’s stance against diversity initiatives.
Some local and state police officials are particularly concerned about the $500 million in cuts to their agencies and to organizations that support public safety efforts. Bondi has branded the cuts as a move to more directly invest in local and state police agencies. But some agencies are already feeling a budget crunch.
In June, a group of law enforcement leaders from around the country sent a letter to Bondi urging her to restore gun violence prevention grants, saying the money fueled initiatives that reduced homicides and other crimes, according to Reuters. So far, the Department of Justice has not changed course.
Some of the budget cuts targeted funding for police officer training and wellness, technical assistance for rural departments and other grants to law enforcement. But the biggest cuts affected other efforts — many run by other public agencies or non-profit groups — that augment and complement policing, like mental-health crisis responders, substance abuse programs, and community violence intervention.
In early July, a federal judge allowed the cuts to proceed, while calling them “shameful.” Judge Amit Mehta, in Washington D.C., concluded that the administration’s action “is likely to harm communities and individuals vulnerable to crime and violence,” but that it wasn’t within his power to stop it. “Displeasure and sympathy are not enough in a court of law,” Mehta wrote.
A staffer from the Department of Governmental Efficiency compiled the initial list of programs to be cut, according to reporting from Reuters. Justice Department officials said they were pivoting to putting the money towards programs that more directly supported law enforcement, but experts told The Marshall Project that the shift is not supported by the data.
“What’s so striking about these cuts, is that it really undermines the administration and [the Justice] Department’s stated claims to prioritize tackling violent crime, because many of the grants that we looked at were doing precisely that,” said Nicole Ndumele, a former Department of Justice deputy attorney general who now works as a senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, a liberal-leaning, non-partisan, criminal justice think tank. Ndumele was part of a team that analyzed the cuts and concluded that they are likely to increase crime.
The cuts, she said, “really get to the heart of undermining everyone in America’s shared interest in living in a safe community.”
A number of the federal cuts targeted policing research, for example a $1 million grant to study whether officers who train in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu might use less force or sustain fewer personal injuries on duty. The Marshall Project investigated this concept in 2021, as it was beginning to catch on in departments across the country, and found very little empirical data on the effort.
Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Foundation, said that research like this is invaluable because police departments are often on their own in determining what kind of training to pursue.
“American policing needs to know what works, period. And there’s no central repository to get that information,” Wexler said. He noted that Justice Department-funded studies are often the closest thing the country has to a “Good Housekeeping Seal of approval that police departments can have in determining what training works.”
In rural Covington County in southern Alabama, another of the now-cancelled grants had been paying for a “Connect and Protect” program that paired sheriff’s deputies with mental health professionals in responding to certain calls and trained officers in crisis de-escalation. The program also set up a telehealth system so that people in crisis could be evaluated on the spot instead of hauled to jail or the emergency room.
The loss of funding has led to staff departures, and will force officers back to handling mental health calls alone, according to a spokesperson for the South Central Alabama Mental Health Center, which administers the program. “If funding is not restored, we risk reverting to a fragmented and reactive system, where law enforcement bears the burden of mental health crises, and individuals in need face unnecessary trauma, delays or incarceration,” the center said via email.
Other programs are somewhat more optimistic about weathering the loss of funding. The 30×30 Initiative, for example, is an effort by the Policing Project and New York University law school seeking to increase the proportion of women police officers in the U.S. to 30% by 2030. The effort is built on research that shows female officers use less force and less excessive force, face fewer lawsuits and are generally perceived as more trustworthy and compassionate by people affected by violent crime.
Maureen McGough, the program’s chief of strategic initiatives, said the funding cuts will limit the effort’s effectiveness, but she’s still bullish on their prospects. “I can’t overstate how much state and local [law enforcement agencies] have stayed with us,” McGough said, even as the federal government cuts funding and as federal agencies pull out of partnerships with 30×30. “I have so much faith in this current and next generation of law enforcement leaders to promote this work internally, which is where it matters most.”
Trump’s stance on policing-related issues at the start of his second term has surprised even some people who worked for the Justice Department the first time he was in office. Federal prosecutors tried to withdraw from most Obama-era investigations of police during Trump’s first term, but the Justice Department still investigated and found civil rights violations in the police department in Springfield, Massachusetts. Trump also pulled back federal grant money for policing in his first term, but people in the policing sector say this round of cuts is far more severe.
Even though many of the groups affected by the cuts are not directly embedded in local police agencies, sheriffs and police chiefs are bracing for the indirect impacts.
The Marshall Project reached out to dozens of police agencies for this story. Almost all declined to comment or did not return calls and emails.
Chief Mitchell Davis III at the Hazel Crest Police Department in a suburb of Chicago was an exception. He’s on the board of the International Association of Chiefs of Police and a past president of the Illinois Association of Chiefs of Police.
Davis said his department of 37 sworn officers has not experienced cuts yet. But most of his supplemental funding comes from federal grants handed out on the state level, so he thinks he will have to abandon his hopes to keep up with the latest advances in crime-fighting equipment.
“I don’t know anyone who’s got enough money,” Davis said of local police departments. “We all rely to some extent on federal funding, and when that is taken off the table, it’s going to hinder us.”
