The Trump administration has asked Congress to delete a portion of a federal law that requires the Office on Violence Against Women to be a separate office within the Justice Department, part of a shake-up experts say would hamstring the office’s visibility and saddle victim grant programs with more bureaucracy.
The White House, in the fine print of its fiscal 2026 budget request appendix released last week, proposed a 29 percent cut to appropriated OVW program funding, writing that it and other department grantmaking components “will be consolidated” into the Office of Justice Programs.
As part of the budget request, the White House includes proposed language that would entirely delete a subsection of law that requires OVW to be “a separate and distinct office” within the DOJ, with a director who reports to the attorney general and has “final authority over all grants, cooperative agreements, and contracts awarded by the Office.”
