The Insidious Threat of the DOJ’s Office of Justice Programs

Mar 25

At the Department of Justice, small spending has big effects.

This report was originally featured in Restoration of America News and appears here with permission.

Alphabet agencies and sub-agencies are common features of Washington life: Open invitations for citizens’ eyes to glaze and bureaucrats to expand power in the absence of scrutiny. Recently, Restoration News has reported on a series of these agencies and subagencies, from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to subagencies in the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Education. In every case, Restoration has shown how, safe within their agencies’ and sub-agencies’ obscurity, insider operators have pushed a liberal-progressive agenda of trauma-based treatments, identity politicking, working class displacement, and data-based surveillance.

The Office of Justice Programs (OJP) is another, even more obscure agency, with equally insidious effects. Almost nobody has heard of the OJP in the Department of Justice (DOJ). In fact, an honest reaction to coming across the name might be to think that someone is misnaming the Department of Justice. But the OJP is a very real sub-agency, founded in 1984 and composed, in turn, of six sub-sub-agencies, or “program offices.” At least four of these (the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, the National Institute of Justice, the Bureau of Justice Assistance, and the Office for Victims of Crime) use recommendations, studies and grants to push establishment priorities into the lives of regular Americans by stealth.

One telling aspect of these pushes is that the amounts of money are small but their effect reaches wide and deep. Washington, D.C. operators began employing a strategy in the 1960s to use small amounts of money to target local communities. Because of their size, small communities are affected by the money in outsized ways. Establishment media has accused the Trump Administration of making cuts mainly for show—a “drop in the bucket” of Washington spending. But publicly gutting programs at the OJP would demonstrate exactly how small dollar amounts from the federal government destroy lives and communities in the real world.

One Office Amps Up Government Spending, with Unclear Effects

The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) seems like the most important of the OJP offices: Handling on a national level minors involved in the justice system. But a closer look shows that the OJJDP’s impacts only encourage government spending and promote progressive ideology.

The most obvious feature of this office is how hard it is to track its work. Its Report to Congress for the 2023-2024 Fiscal Year is not accessible on its website: It blocks users from accessing a “government document” without a password. One can only find the report on the website of a progressive nonprofit, the Gault Center.

The OJJDP’s work, according to its 2023-24 Report, falls along the Gault’s Center’s preferred lines. Among the OJJDP’s many recommendations to Congress and the White House is to “allow Federal funding and reimbursement for treatment modalities that are culturally responsive to Black and Indigenous people, and other People of Color (e.g., Tribal wellness practices).” Another actually available booklet from the OJP shows that this investment has occurred through some part of the office since at least 2003, when George W. Bush’s Attorney General John Ashcroft provided the OJP with federal funds to give to reservation courts. Since a recent Supreme Court decision has made reservations to a great extent their own domains based on treaties America signed with Indian nations, this is almost the equivalent of sending Americans’ money to Ukraine.

The OJJDP also invests in “restorative practices that integrate victims and work to repair harm” through its Coordinating Council, charged with “the coordination of all Federal delinquency programs (in cooperation with State and local juvenile justice programs).” The Coordinating Council recommends that the U.S. government “fund approaches that look beyond traditional, punitive methods to focus on the ecology of support and accountability (e.g., cultural connectedness and knowledge, repair and healing using a trauma-informed lens).”

The effects of the Coordinating Council’s recommendations are hard to know. It’s certainly not encouraging that, by its own description, the Coordinating Council has such close relationships to not just state and local juvenile justice programs via its work on child delinquency but also supervises “all Federal programs and activities that detain or care for unaccompanied juveniles, and all Federal programs relating to missing and exploited children.” Nor is it encouraging that the Coordinating Council’s leader during the Biden Administration, Liz Ryan, seems to have progressive loyalties.

But, even apart from disquieting signs from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency, other sub-sub-agencies of the OJP are more targeted in introducing their priorities to local communities on the ground.

The National Institute of Justice Expands Federal Power, and Priorities

Case in point: The National Institute of Justice (NIJ). The NIJ has the mission of using its grantmaking power to “advance justice through science.” But a look at some of its grants, accessible via a series of links, shows exactly what this advancement means: Co-option of local law enforcement to push projects increasing national priorities and power. Specifically, the NIJ uses grants to local police forces and other organizations to push liberal-progressive priorities on unsuspecting communities.

The NIJ funds projects via the Law Enforcement Advancing Data and Science Program (LEADS), directed at “officers, civilians, and academics”—not exactly “scientific.” That is to say, they aren’t really “designed to increase the research capabilities of law enforcement officers and agencies” except in very narrow areas. Judging by the first five grantees alone, these areas focus on trauma, surveillance, human resources development, sustainability, and (incredibly) researching LEADS’ own effectiveness. The funding might not necessarily be sizeable, but the effect of officers in specific departments pushing these priorities on unsuspecting localities is likely significant.

For example, Lieutenant Matt Siders of the Fargo, ND Police Department received a grant for researching “evidence based solutions to increase support for law enforcement officers struggling with work related stress, fatigue and declining mental health.” Ashley Kierpaul, a Police Psychologist and Sergeant with the Michigan State Police, received her grant for “developing and evaluating treatment modalities for first responders and veterans to combat the cumulative effects of trauma and stress accumulated through their career.”

Sergeant Duwayne A. Poorboy of the San Marcos, Texas, Police Department is currently working on projects with Dr. Lucia Summers from Texas State University’s Center for Geospatial Intelligence and Investigation, whose work focuses on data collection by state governments. Dr. Summers is also a devotee of Jeremy Bentham’s “utilitarian calculation of ‘the greatest good for the greatest number,’ grounded in a careful evaluation of the data.” Since Bentham’s utilitarian calculation included an all-seeing surveillance mechanism (the Panopticon) with no regard for civil liberties, this is not necessarily the view one wants from an expert in law enforcement technology.

Then there’s Marisol Cortez, the Operations Program Supervisor of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, who “implements evidence-based practices for effective sustainable operations, and developing programs that support workforce development/retention and organizational cohesion.” There’s also Melissa Thompson, whose “research interests include a longitudinal study on the effects of the LEAD program as well as the effectiveness of mentorship programs in developing future leaders.” In other words, Cortez is being funded for H.R. and climate programs and Thompson is being funded by LEAD to research LEAD’s effectiveness—the ultimate in circularity. (How ineffective is she likely to call LEAD, since she’s receiving its funds?)

In sum, officers are being encouraged to apply for grants that reflect Washington’s liberal-progressive priorities—they drink the kool-aid, get paid for it, and spread it.

The Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) Pushes Federal Money on Local Police…

The Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant (JAG) Program, “the leading source of federal justice funding to state and local jurisdictions,” is the recipient of an average $367 million per year for the past fifteen years. Where this funding goes isn’t entirely clear. A hunt online reveals multiple listings of state-by-state recipients but not why they’ve received the funding. The best bet for getting answers is tracing funds using discrete announcements by individual recipients.

An example is the town of Miami Lakes, which in November of 2023 was “proud to announce the awarding of the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant (JAG) Funds from the Office of Criminal Justice based on “a need for officers to be able to patrol certain areas of our town only accessible by bike.” Another is Bradenton, Florida, the “friendly city,” which applied for a grant in 2024 for “forensic data extraction software license and eight (8) Rapid-ID systems.” In the last four years, meanwhile, the city of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, has received between $86,000 and $100,000 from the Byrne Program each year. It has used these grants for investigative and operational equipment.

Obvious questions arise from reading these lists. What, exactly do funding for “patrol[ing] certain areas . . . only accessible by bike” and “investigative and operational equipment” enhancement mean? If, as with Brandenton, a city provides a more detailed explanation of how grants will help officers, can other, non-federal funding fill the need? History shows that federal grants to police have come with explicit or implicit strings attached. This raises a question: is the Fort Lauderdale police department’s commitment to “a community that is diverse, rapidly growing, innovative, and progressive” (a community so-“unprogressive” that also fired its last police chief for undertaking DEI initiatives) a home-grown initiative? Or is it one pushed by the same federal sub-agency, the OJP, which is committed to DEI and which is funding Fort Lauderdale? Finally, is it possible, given the difficulty of finding information about how OJP grants are used, to even know what priorities are being pushed behind the scenes?

…and Restorative Justice via Nonprofits and Studies

Certainly, the Bureau of Justice Assistance has been aggressive in pushing progressive priorities on the national level—and there’s no reason to think it’s not doing the same on the local. The prime example of this is a 2018 Bureau of Justice assistance “solicitation for congressional funding to launch a National Center on Restorative Justice.” In response,

Vermont Law and Graduate School (VLGS) submitted a proposal in collaboration with the University of Vermont (UVM) and the University of San Diego (USD). In March of 2020, the BJA awarded the grant to VLGS and its partners. Soon thereafter, the BJA announced additional grant funding was appropriated by Congress to manage the [National Center for Restorative Justice]. [Vermont Law and Graduate School] and partners submitted two more competitive applications and, in February 2021 and September 2023, received a second and third BJA award to manage and expand work of the NCORJ.

The National Center on Restorative Justice is awarding 2 grants of $250,000.00 each for 2025. The Bureau of Justice Assistance, since 2023, has also sponsored no fewer than 23 research articles or events on the topic. This focus continues even as Restorative Justice’s effects over the past ten years have been documented. These effects, as Restoration News has recently reported, include school violence, teacher walkouts, and a mass shooter allowed to continue coming to school before his shooting despite a history of violent outbursts and mental issues.

Joint Programs the OJP’s Sub-Sub Agencies Support

Then there are the programs all three of these sub-sub agencies—Bureau of Justice Assistance, National Institute of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention—support in partnership with other OJP offices, including the Office for Victims of Crime. A telling example is the Community Based Violence Intervention and Prevention Initiative. One site of the Initiative’s work is in Oakland, CA, where all four of these sub-sub-agencies combined to give the city a $2 million grant in 2024. The purpose of this grant was to “deliver intensive life coaching services to an estimated 75 individuals at immediate risk of gun violence” through “daily contacts, safety planning, life mapping, motivational interviewing, and tenants of cognitive behavioral therapy.”

Oakland, certainly has its problems—one of them being the massive government funding of Silicon Valley which has brought in an influx of out-of-state workers with liberal-progressive politics who have displaced its working and middle class. Disorder at the bottom of a community, e.g. gun violence, is a natural end stage of this process of bleeding away social cohesion. But putting government money into therapeutic targeting doesn’t solve the problem. Instead, it just expands national power in a new way, using the same psychological control techniques used by other sectors of the federal government in education settings—which Restoration News has reported on extensively in the past.

Why—and How—to Cut the OJP

As this report has demonstrated, the OJP is one of those sub-agencies whose effect cannot simply be measured by the amount of funding it or its sub-sub-agencies receives. The effect of a single grant to a single small or mid-sized community, or to a single influential officer on a local police force, can re-shape the priorities of that community or police force. This is why cuts of only millions of dollars in federal funding can make a major difference on Americans’ lives on the ground.

They also hit at a fundamental truth about power grasped by our Founders and the colonists who supported them: as their most eminent chronicler put it, “its…aggressiveness: its endless…tendency to expand…beyond legitimate boundaries.” For them, the size of power’s aggrandizement didn’t matter—in fact, smaller incursions could be even more threatening because they were less noticed. Hence their resistance to every attempt by the British, even the smallest and most indirect, to tax them without their consent.

Ideally, the Trump administration should work to dissolve the OJP and its sub-sub-agencies.Some of these agencies, before being brought under the OJP, were created by congressional legislation. While working with Congress for a permanent solution, Trump could appoint officials who will ask for less funding for these sub-sub-agencies, de facto shutting down many of these departments. The administration should limit those departments that remain to doing what only the federal government can do—focusing on issues like law enforcement coordination across state lines.

For too long, the alphabet sub and sub-sub-agencies of Washington, D.C. have sidestepped the Constitution to infiltrate the lives of regular Americans. Reforming the OJP would build momentum towards rolling back that federal creep—permanently, as intended by the Founders.

Matt Wolfson