Trump cuts gun violence prevention grants as hospitals lose funding

The Justice Department terminated 373 grants worth $820 million in April 2025, including 69 community violence intervention awards that had totaled more than $300 million. Federal pages tied to the Surgeon General’s June 2024 Advisory on Firearm Violence disappeared from Health and Human Services websites, stripping away public reports that hospitals, outreach workers and policymakers had used to track prevention efforts.

The cuts reached cities including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, DC, Baltimore, Oakland, Detroit and St. Louis. In St. Louis, one clinic lost a Justice Department grant with $1.3 million remaining, money that had helped support a mobile clinic and outreach work. Hospital-based violence intervention programs, which try to reach shooting victims before retaliation or another emergency visit, were among the groups squeezed as federal support fell away.

The rollback reversed a federal investment built under the 2022 Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which expanded community violence intervention funding and helped create the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention under President Joe Biden. Donald Trump dismantled that office on his first day in office. The Justice Department said the grants no longer fit its priorities, even as violence-prevention leaders warned that pulling funding would damage trust and interrupt work that often depends on consistent neighborhood relationships.

The Surgeon General’s Advisory on Firearm Violence, issued in June 2024 by Vivek Murthy, was the first Surgeon General publication focused on guns, and the Philadelphia Center for Gun Violence Reporting republished it after the federal pages disappeared in March and May 2025. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lists firearm injuries and suicides as preventable and points to street outreach, hospital-based violence intervention, gatekeeper programs and secure firearm storage as evidence-based approaches.

Federal and medical sources have cited roughly 40,000 firearm deaths a year in the United States, and a 2020 paper in the Journal of General Internal Medicine found research had long been stymied by restrictive federal appropriations language.