The Government Shutdown Is Endangering Domestic Violence Survivors
As hundreds of thousands of federal employees are furloughed, the grant offices that fund DV shelters have gone dark.
Photo: iStockphoto Politics
It’s been more than two weeks since the second government shutdown under a Trump presidency, and as of October 10, CNN estimates roughly 750,000 federal employees have been furloughed. At least two-thirds of the workers at the CDC are absent from their desks, as well as nearly half of the IRS, and about 10% of the Department of Justice’s 115,000 employees—many of whom are grant managers that help provide federal support to organizations serving victims of domestic violence. The timing is especially stark, given that October is National Domestic Violence Awareness Month.
“The grants portals are all closed down,” Lauren Schuster, the vice president of government affairs at the Urban Resource Institute (URI), told Jezebel. “There’s a deadline for a grant on [October] 16th, for just about a million dollars, through the Office on Violence Against Women (OVW)—that’s one of the federal agencies that we work with—and we cannot submit that grant unless the government opens up. And with the furloughs that are happening, there’s nobody to talk to about any of this.”
According to Politico, furloughing grant managers is not standard procedure in a shutdown, and employees in three DOJ grant offices worked through shutdowns in 2013, 2018, and 2019. Speaking anonymously to the outlet, five staffers suggested the furloughs could be an intentional maneuver to staunch the flow of aid used to help victims.
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