Gun violence prevention efforts and research the Trump admin has targeted so far

Since President Donald Trump returned to office, cuts and layoffs related to gun violence have hit the CDC, the National Institutes for Health and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Federal funding for research, only just made available six years ago, is also at risk.

Government-funded community violence prevention programs and hospital-based intervention efforts have also been targeted. The White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention was shuttered and a surgeon general advisory on gun violence and public health was taken down.

Many of these cuts began in April. That month, about 10,000 employees were cut from the Department of Health and Human Services, The Trace reported. That included entire teams at the CDC's Injury Center, which collects data on violent death and injuries, such as suicides, domestic violence, firearm sucides and unintentional shootings.

Data on firearm deaths and injuries is already challenging to access and these cuts threaten the reliable federal data reporters depend on to cover firearm violence. Losing access to data also hinders research.

Researchers and advocates also worry about how these cuts will impact efforts to study and prevent gun violence.

Experts told The Trace that cuts at the CDC undermine the federal government's already limited ability to combat gun violence.

"By eliminating the programmatic staff, you've eliminated CDC's ability to take knowledge, apply it, and help communities use it to make a difference," a former CDC official told The Trace.

But it's not just research that would be impacted. Losing funding for violence prevention efforts could also reverse the recent progress to curb shootings, prevention advocates have said.

As one violence interruptertold The Trace : "It's almost a death wish to take this kind of money out of our communities."

CDC suffers

The CDC's Division of Violence Prevention, which studies gun deaths and injuries and works on prevention efforts, lost about three-quarters of its staff in April, according to The Trace.

And the CDC division that manages WISQARS - a database that includes gun deaths and injuries - was decimated except for a suicide prevention unit. At least 40 people in the division received termination notices, according to Mother Jones.

(With threats to CDC data, it's important to keep in mind which states manage public data dashboards, such as the 19 states that have their own violent death reporting systems, which we cover here.)

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, or ATF, also suffered cuts in Trump's latest spending bill, according to the Center for American Progress. The bureau's budget was cut by over a quarter.

The spending bill also eliminated the National Firearms Act's $200 tax on short-barreled rifles and shotguns, silencers and covert guns.

Additional cuts

A Senate bipartisan spending plan for the upcoming fiscal year largely keeps the CDC's budget intact, but that could change when it reaches the House, The Trace reported.

Federal funding for gun violence research is threatened. After a dearth in funding for over two decades, Congress started supplying funds for gun violence research in 2019.

Cuts at other federal agencies also impact gun violence prevention efforts.

More than $150 million in Justice Department grants were also canceled, which impacted at least 65 community-based programs across 25 states, The Trace reported. The grants were managed by the department's Community Based Violence Intervention and Prevention Initiative.

The terminated grants provided federal support for violence reduction, policing and prosecution, victims' services, juvenile justice and child protection, substance use and mental health treatment, corrections and reentry, justice system enhancements, research and evaluation, and other state- and local-level public safety functions.

According to Reuters, the Justice Department terminated 365 grants totalling $811 million for several programs, including crime victim services, addiction recovery programs, trauma centers, sign language interpretation for domestic violence victims and police training.

The Department of Education cut $1 billion in Safer Communities Act funding. Those dollars were meant to drive down school violence and support students' mental health.

It's not just funding that's been impacted. The Trump administration also repealed the ATF's "zero tolerance" policy that revoked the licenses of gun dealers who willfully violated federal law. Those violations included failing to run background checks, transferring firearms to people who couldn't own guns, falsifying records and failing to respond to an ATF crime gun tracing request, according to The Smoking Gun.

The ATF's enforcement capacity has also been reduced, according to Everytown for Gun Safety. Reuters reported that about 80% of ATF's agents have been diverted to immigration enforcement.

And within 48 hours of taking office, Trump shuttered the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention. The office responsible for coordinating the federal government's response to gun crime and violence.

Data sources

There are still reliable and accessible data sources available for journalists. As we often cover here, the nonprofit Gun Violence Archive offers near real-time data on shootings.

For now, the National Violent Death Reporting System remains available at the CDC.

Several states have also created their version of the violent death reporting system.

As of late July, 19 states have created and published their own violent death reporting systems. These are great resources for statewide reporting and, in some cases, for covering violent deaths at the county and city levels.

Here are the states with their version of NVDRS so far and links to the dashboards: