President Donald Trump stepped into office and immediately got to work. He started raising all kinds of hell, and the chaos was highly entertaining for me. Stability is fine when the status quo is tolerable. When it’s not, it’s time to shake things up.
Not everyone agreed, of course, and the media has done its part to pretend that every grant that ended or office that was closed was absolutely vital to the people of the world.
Which is funny in and of itself because we’re not responsible for the world.
Either way, one thing that got cut was a lot of grants going to programs that claim to combat so-called gun violence, and people are still upset over it.
Violent crime was already trending down from a COVID-era spike when President Donald Trump presented a picture of unbridled crime in America on the campaign trail in 2024. Now his administration has eliminated about $500 million in grants to organizations that buttress public safety, including many working to prevent gun violence.
In Oakland, California, a hospital-based program to prevent retaliatory gun violence lost a $2 million grant just as the traditionally turbulent summer months approach. Another $2 million award was pulled from a Detroit program that offers social services and job skills to young people in violent neighborhoods. And in St. Louis, a clinic treating the physical and emotional injuries of gunshot victims also lost a $2 million award.
They are among 373 grants that the U.S. Department of Justice abruptly terminated in April. The largest share of the nixed awards were designated for community-based violence intervention — programs that range from conflict mediation and de-escalation to hospital-based initiatives that seek to prevent retaliation from people who experience violent injuries.
Gun violence is among America’s most deadly public health crises, medical experts say.
Among programs whose grants were terminated were those for protecting children, victims’ assistance, hate-crime prevention, and law enforcement and prosecution, according to an analysis by the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan think tank. The grants totaled $820 million when awarded, but some of that money has been spent.
“Not only are these funds being pulled away from worthy investments that will save lives,” said Thomas Abt, founding director of the Violence Reduction Center at the University of Maryland, “but the way that this was done — by pulling authorized funding without warning — is going to create a lasting legacy of mistrust.”
I. Don’t. Care.
I honestly don’t care if the people who were getting federal funding to address local problems don’t trust the federal government anymore. No one should trust the federal government, for crying out loud.
What I do care about, though, is what happens with taxpayer money.
Now, if these programs work, then that’s not the worst thing in the world my tax dollars could go toward. However, what’s interesting here is that there isn’t really much evidence that they do, in fact, work. All that’s cited is a drop in violent crime, but that’s a trend that’s been going on all across the nation, including in places with no such programs in place.
That’s not very convincing.
Plus, let’s also understand why some of those programs were cut.
The Council on Criminal Justice analysis of the terminated grants found that descriptions of 31% of them included references to “diversity,” “equity,” “race,” “racial,” “racism,” or “gender.”
So nearly a third put a bunch of progressive word salad in their grant proposals, then get shocked when a non-progressive takes office and decides that’s a waste of taxpayer money.
Shocking.
Especially when the inclusion of those words at all makes me wonder just how many of them were really focused on violent crime in any real way, versus using the money for some other purpose.
After all, we saw a lot of funds going to a lot of places for very stupid reasons. I see no reason to believe that couldn’t happen here.
Regardless, many of the grants are being restored. Other organizations are welcome to appeal and possibly get their grants restored as well. If they’re really doing something good, then they should at least try.
But I’m also kind of sick of people thinking that just because a program claims something, we should just accept their claims and pretend that it’s sacrosanct. It’s not, especially with so much graft being noticed for the first time this year.
It’s just not fair to blast Trump for taking steps to stamp that out, even if you think he was overzealous in doing so, simply because he’s the only one who has actually bothered to try. Especially since we really don’t have any evidence they actually worked.
Read the full article here
