The US Justice Department has terminated hundreds of active grants that funded various programs, including mental health services for police officers and support for victims of crime and sexual assault, as per the internal documents and four sources familiar with the situation. Two sources, who spoke anonymously since the information hasn’t been officially released, said that at least 365 grants from the Office of Justice Programs, the department’s biggest grant-distributing division, were terminated late Tuesday.

In the 2023 fiscal year, this office had awarded $4.4 billion in funding, as stated on the Justice Department’s website.

Some of the programs losing funding include grants for transgender crime victims, hotlines for people affected by crime, support for organisations helping immigrants and refugees impacted by human trafficking, initiatives to prevent youth crime and protect young people in detention, and funding for state-level hate crime reporting systems, according to a partial list of cancelled grants reviewed by Reuters. Justice Department grants usually last three years. While it’s normal for a new administration to shift grant priorities, it’s rare for the department to stop funding programs that were already approved and are still active.

In an email to Office of Justice Programs staff on Tuesday, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Maureen Henneberg explained that the grants being cancelled "no longer support the department's priorities." She went on to say that the updated funding goals will now concentrate on "certain law enforcement operations, combating violent crime, protecting American children, supporting American victims of trafficking and sexual assault, and promoting coordination of law enforcement efforts at all levels of government."

A spokesperson for the Justice Department was not available for comment right away. Reuters could not confirm the amount of money involved in the cancelled grants, but available records suggest the cuts add up to at least several million dollars. Taxpayers didn’t fund some cancelled grants, but they were financed through fines and penalties collected from convicted criminals. According to sources, many Justice Department employees responsible for overseeing and distributing these grants were unaware of the cancellations until the recipients were officially informed on Tuesday.

According to someone familiar with the situation, the Justice Department’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, which handles its grants, hasn’t been impacted so far. It’s still unclear whether the Office of Violence Against Women, another independent grant-making branch within the department, has been affected.

Meanwhile, Justice Department leaders are considering combining all their grant-making offices under the Office of Justice Programs, in line with President Donald Trump’s executive order to reduce costs.