Heading into the final month of fiscal 2025, there was nary a grant announced by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP), the division of the Justice Department that funds everything from facility standards to mentoring and child protection.
The process for competing out those grants is finally underway, with a slew of notices for funding announced in the past few weeks. But with a government shutdown looking likely to start tomorrow, for who knows how long, it could be a long time until last year’s funds get out the door.
Here is a list of the grant programs that OJJDP has kickstarted:
- Children’s Advocacy Centers, which facilitate the interviewing of traumatized children who experience serious abuse and neglect (Some of these centers have already been on a roller coaster ride regarding their existing federal funds)
- Mentoring programs that are national in scope, that noperate in more than one state, or serve youth affected by substance abuse
- The training program of Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force operations
- Post-secondary education for child protection professionals
- Supporting children exposed to violence
- Enhancement of legal counsel for system-involved youth who cannot afford attorneys
- Youth drug prevention
- Emergency planning for youth justice facilities
- Reducing recidivism for system-involved girls
The deadlines for groups seeking these funds are all in October, and in a standard process, it might take a few months for a review to be completed and awards to be announced. But that might not be how this goes, if the process for runaway and homeless youth grants at the Department of Health and Human Services is any indication.
Those grants were announced in mid-July, with a tight deadline for applicants to submit that some observers believed was illegal under federal regulations around the discretionary grant process. Youth Services Insider has learned that while HHS has yet to publicly announce winners, applicants are already being notified if they received one of the runaway and homeless youth grants.
So it seems possible that the Justice Department, too, will move on an expedited timeline to determine grant winners. But that could be stymied if the federal government shuts down for a prolonged period of time. Congressional Democrats met with Trump and Republican leadership this week for the first time on a potential deal to avoid a shutdown tomorrow, but nothing has been announced yet.
Over the summer, some observers feared that the Justice Department might just let some of its 2025 grant funds expire today and return the money to the Treasury, effectively slow-killing grants it did not want to make. But the department informed Youth Services Insider in August that it had the ability to make those 2025 grants in fiscal 2026 if it wished, and still intended to do so on a rolling basis.
The potential shutdown could also greatly impact the grant making process for 2026. For starters, that money won’t be available unless there is a spending deal and funds are actually appropriated to the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. But the Trump administration has indicated that if there is a shutdown, it could use that situation to initiate massive layoffs across the federal government. And that could again slow down the process of getting 2026 funds out the door, if and when they are appropriated.
