More than $200 million in federal funds that was supposed to go to help victims of domestic violence, sexual assault, stalking and trafficking last fiscal year still hasn’t been paid out to the nonprofits and other entities that form the safety net for those impacted by gender-based violence.

The Office on Violence Against Women in the Department of Justice is tasked with administering grants prescribed by the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), first passed in 1994.

Congress appropriated $713 million to the office in fiscal 2025, which ended September 30. Only $472 million of that has been distributed, according to an analysis of publicly available documents by The 19th. An additional $36 million went toward financing the management of the office itself, per the DOJ grants budget.

That leaves at least $204 million as of April 9 that has not been allocated to groups that depend on those grants.

The undistributed grants include funding meant to help older adult survivors of abuse, strengthen responses to dating violence on college campuses and provide culturally specific assistance for sexual assault survivors.

A spokesperson for the Department of Justice confirmed the amount of 2025 funding that has been distributed and said the department could not speculate about when the rest would be given out.

An executive order issued last year is contributing to the holdup by adding a new step to the evaluation of federal grantmaking, requiring that all grants be approved by a senior political appointee. The order explicitly takes aim at research funding distributed by the National Science Foundation, which President Donald Trump accused of supporting “anti-American ideologies,” and the National Institutes of Health, but its impact has rippled far beyond the scientific community. The DOJ spokesperson did not respond to inquiries about who would approve grants for the Office on Violence Against Women.

Federal grant administration had already been disrupted for months prior to the August 2025 order.

Read the full article about federal funds supporting gender-based violence survivors by Jasmine Mithani at The 19th.