Why Is Congress Leaving Abused Women and Children in The Lurch?

Something is missing from the new Trump-backed year-end spending bill that Congress has to pass by midnight on Friday to prevent a government shutdown: Support for critical services for abused women and children.

As I have reported for Mother Jones, there is a funding crisis facing the Crime Victims Fund, a pot of federal money established by the 1984 Victims of Crime Act that supports domestic violence shelters, rape crisis centers, and child advocacy centers nationwide. The money comes from financial penalties levied in corporate criminal cases, and as federal prosecutors have collected less money, deposits into the Crime Victims Fund have shrunk massively, from about $6.6 billion in 2017 to $2.5 billion this year. (Because of caps set by Congress since 2000 to manage fluctuations in the fund, the amount of money disbursed has been even lower.)

Those cuts have trickled down to programs that provide lifesaving services for women and children in the aftermath of abuse. As I chronicled in a months-long investigation published in October, the declining funds—which are distributed to states based on their population size, and then to programs—have had ripple effects across the country, put multiple hotlines catering to domestic violence survivors at risk and imperiling legal advocacy services for survivors, among other impacts. As Judge Shelley Santry, a family court judge in Louisville, told me: “The consequence [of losing those services] may be death.”

The declining funds have also been disastrous for child advocacy centers: One center in rural northern Wisconsin that provided trauma-informed forensic interviews to about 50 kids annually for free—to gather the facts of their abuse to support criminal prosecutions and facilitate the kids’ healing—shuttered in October due to the funding cuts. Advocates in four other states told me the funding declines forced them to cut personnel or left them unable to fill vacant positions, leading to longer wait times for children and burnout for existing staff. Lynn Scott, executive director of the Alabama Network of Children’s Advocacy Centers, told me further funding cuts “would really close some doors” in her state—likely at a half-dozen or so centers in rural areas, she estimated.  

Lawmakers introduced a bill in Congress earlier this year that promised to help fix the funding crisis and seemed to have sweeping, bipartisan support: The CVF Stabilization Act would divert additional funds collected through the False Claims Act, which penalizes defrauding of the government, through 2029. It attracted more than 200 co-sponsors in the House, and a half-dozen in the Senate. Advocates said that while it would not permanently solve the the crisis, it could play an important role in helping to restore the funds: Since fiscal year 2017, according to the DOJ, $1.7 billion from the False Claims Act has gone into the General Fund of the Treasury—money that could otherwise go into the Crime Victims Fund if the new bill was passed.

Despite a big push from advocacy groups to get the bill passed before the end of the year, it failed to get any committee hearings or floor votes. (Spokespeople for the House and Senate Judiciary Committees chairs Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), who also co-sponsored the Senate bill, did not return requests for comment. Neither did spokespeople for Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-.N.Y.) or House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.).)

Its exclusion from the spending bill is the final nail in the coffin, at least for this session of Congress. “We tried hard to get it included in the [spending bill], but right now, there’s not an agreement on anything,” said Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.), a cosponsor of the CVF Stabilization Act. “It is very clear to me that Congress has got to do better job of prioritizing crime survivors.”

There are other measures Congress could take that it hasn’t: Biden has recommended a $7.3 billion infusion into the Crime Victims Fund to account for the historic decline, but Congress has yet to act on it. Advocates are hoping that when the next budget does pass next year, Congress will include $1.9 billion in appropriations for the Crime Victims Fund. While the draft Senate appropriations bill meets the request for $1.9 billion, the draft House bill is so far only offering $1.5 billion.

In letter to Congress earlier this year, more than 700 prosecutors and 42 state attorneys general urged members to bolster the funding source in both the short and long-term to support survivors. “Millions of victims, including abused children and battered women, will be left without access to safety, justice and healing,” the prosecutors wrote.

Dingell said she doesn’t think her colleagues don’t care about supporting survivors of crimes, but rather that they don’t understand how dire the funding crisis actually is. “I think it’s a matter of peoples’ priorities,” she said. “If they don’t talk to [survivors] like I do, they don’t understand they’re going to be left without assistance and nothing—nothing—to help them navigate the aftermath of crime.”

Advocates fear what further funding cuts will bring. “Survivors and programs cannot continue to wait in limbo for the funding they desperately need,” Stephanie Love-Patterson, president and CEO of the National Network to End Domestic Violence, said in a statement Thursday. She added that the organization remains “encouraged by the overwhelming bipartisan congressional support of the bill” and hopeful that the bill would pass in the next Congress.

But Claire Ponder Selib, executive director of the National Organization for Victim Advocacy, is less optimistic. “I’m personally quite concerned about the possibilities of this being passed next session,” she told me, adding that it’s “very disappointing” the text of the legislation is absent from the spending bill. Steve Derene, former executive director of the National Association of VOCA Assistance Administrators, is also skeptical: “I’m sort of cynical about it getting past the Senate Judiciary Committee.”

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the incoming chair of that committee, has not signed onto the Senate bill and would be key to it getting a committee hearing. Grassley has not been entirely opposed to replenishing the Crime Victims Fund: He was an initial co-sponsor of the VOCA Fix Act, a 2021 law that diverted revenue from deferred and non-prosecution agreements to the Crime Victims Fund, and earlier this year said Congress should appropriate “the highest possible obligation limit [to the CVF] to help provide resources to crime victims.” But Grassley has also questioned the DOJ about why the VOCA Fix Act has been inadequate to restore the funds, and supported amendments to the False Claims Act—the new proposed source of revenue for the Crime Victims Fund in the latest bill—to bolster support for whistleblowers. (The only organized opposition to the CVF Stabilization Act appears to have come from whistleblowers, who allege that the legislation would siphon funds from people who report government fraud; advocates of the bill say it would preserve payments for whistleblowers.)

A spokesperson for Grassley said in a statement that he “will continue his oversight of the DOJ next Congress to ensure the agency complies with the law and the CVF is filled.” The spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment about whether he would give the CVF Stabilization Act a hearing in the next session.

Dingell, for her part, said she’s undeterred. “I’m gonna work my butt off,” she said. “And I refuse to say there’s no chance.”