Hours after the government shut down Wednesday, the Trump administration shuttered the Department of Justice’s grant-making offices, furloughing employees who help provide federal support to organizations that aid victims of domestic violence and other crimes against women.
While Trump officials have said that furloughs are the result of a government funding lapse that they’d hoped to avoid, five current and former staffers told POLITICO that it didn’t have to be this way, stating that they couldn’t recall similar furloughs during previous shutdowns. Some fear that the moves are part of an effort to permanently weaken a unit established by statute three decades ago — an endeavor they say will imperil victims, advocates as well as law enforcement.
“These are people who are doing God’s work, providing direct assistance to all kinds of victims of violent crime — to families of homicide victims and assault victims and carjacking victims, in addition to victims of child abuse and sexual assault and domestic violence,” said one former DOJ senior official from a grantmaking department who, like others interviewed for this story, was granted anonymity to speak candidly.
“These are systems and programs that are under stress on a good day,” the official continued. “Not being able to work with their grant managers and get advice from them, it’s incredibly disruptive.”
The furloughs at the grant office inside DOJ, which have not been previously reported, exemplify how the four-day old shut down is rippling across the country, affecting dozens of government functions, including those that have typically enjoyed wide bipartisan support.
The email blast that hit inboxes at 2:18 p.m. on Wednesday informed officials in three DOJ grant-making offices that they were being furloughed “until further notice.”
The office, after staff reductions and a travel freeze earlier this year, almost certainly had enough funding left in its budget to continue operations, just as it had in past government shutdowns, said five former staffers, all of whom worked through government shutdowns in 2013 and 2018 and 2019.
At the same time, the administration has telegraphed a desire to shrink the federal bureaucracy and potentially dismantle the grant programs that support community policing efforts, justice programs and domestic violence initiatives aimed at aiding victims, prosecutors and police.
“Their own contingency plan says that they have funds. So it’s a choice to say, ‘We want this to hurt,’” said Marnie Shiels, who worked for 24 years in the Office on Violence Against Women before departing earlier this year. “I can’t know for sure what they’re thinking, but I very much fear that it is about a political motivation of wanting to get rid of this issue, get rid of this office, get rid of the staff.”
The White House referred a request for comment to the Justice Department, which did not respond to an inquiry about the furloughs.
During press briefings this week, Vice President JD Vance and press secretary Karoline Leavitt have argued that the shutdown is entirely the fault of Democrats, and that they bear responsibility for any adverse impacts on affected programs and services. And the automatic emails from DOJ’s grant-making units, as has been the case with other executive branch agencies this week, explicitly state that Democrats are to blame for the shutdown and any services going unprovided.
But the former staffers fear that the Trump administration will use the shutdown as a pretext to make permanent workforce reductions in these offices, impacting the ability to manage hundreds of grant programs. Even if the shutdown lasts only a couple weeks, the attrition could still have a ripple effect on programs across the country doing the work of policing and prosecuting violent gender-based crimes, they said.
Because so many of the affected grants support law enforcement agencies, kneecapping this particular office would seem to run counter to Trump’s broader crackdown on crime, a major focus over the last month with his unprecedented deployment of federal troops to police DC and Memphis, Tennessee. But Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought is also eager to use the government shutdown as a pretext to further reduce the size of government.
“They have said that they want federal employees to feel ‘trauma,’ and how much they want to get rid of federal employees. And you know, we have the president saying that quote about how, you know, ‘a little fight with the wife’ shouldn’t be a crime,” Shiels continued, referring to Trump’s seeming dismissal of domestic violence as a serious crime during a speech at the Museum of the Bible where he complained that offenses “that take place in the home” were making DC’s crime statistics appear worse than he claimed they were.
“They’re clearly showing they don’t understand or care about these issues,” she said.
Shortly after Trump took office, his executive order to halt any gender- or race-based government programs put a number of grant programs and initiatives at risk, including those that aid domestic violence and sexual assault survivors. A nationwide coalition of organizations sued over the new requirements, and a judge last month temporarily blocked the government from enforcing them. On Wednesday just hours after the shutdown began, DOJ lawyers issued new court filings to freeze the litigation and asked another judge to lift the current court order.
According to the email sent to grant recipients, projects that are already funded under existing grants will continue and the Treasury Department’s automated system for requesting payments and draw down funds will remain in service to accept new requests. But without anyone on the job at DOJ’s three grant-making offices — Office of Community Oriented Policing Services , Office of Justice Programs and Office on Violence Against Women — accessing the funds could prove difficult, according to three of the former DOJ staffers.
In many cases, accessing funds involves DOJ’s separate automated system, JustGrants, interacting with the Treasury system. And grantees were informed this week that JustGrants isn’t currently operational. On top of that, some grant awards that were supposed to have gone out in September did not, leaving organizations that rely on them without funding for the new fiscal year starting on Oct. 1.
“There’s an irreparable harm that comes when you delay these funds getting out,” said a second Office of Violence against Women staffer, also granted anonymity to speak candidly without fear of retribution.
One administrator at an organization that is a recipient of an Office of Violence against Women grant said that because federal grant writing is so technical, dependent on using the correct bureaucratic language in the application process to meet compliance requirements, losing access to the grant managers in these offices will slow the flow of federal dollars to organizations that are heavily reliant on them and, ultimately, affect the services they provide.
“When there are no people to answer your questions, you are operating in the dark and a lot of time is wasted,” the administrator said.
Even if it’s not the organization’s fault, its inability to operate erodes trust with employees and the crime victims they’re working to help, the administrator continued.
“If you’re doing victim service provision on the ground and it stops happening, people have the opportunity to create a narrative of negligence,” the administrator said. “Trust everywhere is eroded. People’s needs go unmet and they’re not coming back.”
