Organizations that support sexual assault survivors and raise awareness for sexual violence are experiencing “fear and frustration,” leaders say, as their work is affected by the Trump administration’s federal spending cuts and the increased scrutiny being levied towards federal health organizations.
In the last two weeks, 49 states have reported disruptions to funding tied to the Center for Disease Control’s Rape Prevention and Education (RPE) Program, which issues grants every five years to help fund sexual violence awareness and education initiatives. In Texas, some of the most financially strained centers have resorted to layoffs, NPR first reported.
The Observer has confirmed that The Turning Point, an education, advocacy and counseling organization serving sexual assault survivors in Collin County, was affected by the delayed funding, which should have been issued Feb. 1. The organization was returning to the grant program after taking a short hiatus, The Turning Point Executive Director Wendy Hanna told the Observer. Their last RPE award ended in 2020.
As of Feb. 14, some organizations had reported receiving their contracts; Hanna said the Plano organization’s contract was delivered for signatures Feb. 13, and the group is staying in contact with the state coalition the Texas Association Against Sexual Assault for information “on next steps as they are heavily involved in legislative and funding issues related to our work.”
But until the money is delivered nothing feels certain, said Amy Jones, CEO of the Dallas Area Rape Crisis Center.
Jones warns the two-week contract delay has left many industry leaders wondering if they can actually count on the funding they rely on. The Dallas center has received RPE funding in the past but is not a current grant recipient, something that Jones told the Observer makes it safer for her to speak against the bureaucratic complications.
“Folks are not quite sure what this is going to mean long term. Is this funding going to be pulled permanently?” Jones said. “The reality is there are many organizations where [stalled funding] means they have to make choices. Do I pay salary this month? Do I pay for all of our overhead expenses? Many folks have to lean on a line of credit, or dip into their reserves if they're lucky, if they have it.”
The program is authorized through the 1990s Violence Against Women Act, and many of the organizations that receive the RPE funding use it to pay the salaries of “on the ground” staff who visit schools and universities to teach about sexual violence prevention, healthy relationships and survivor resources.
Consent trainings conducted by groups like the Dallas Area Rape Crisis Center have become a standard practice on most university campuses in light of data showing 26.4% of female and 6.8% of male undergraduates will experience rape or sexual assault during their time on campus.
Now those trainings hang in the balance as their financial viability is threatened.
"What's at stake here are life-saving programs and information and messaging and education for communities in Texas,” Rose Luna, CEO of the Texas Association Against Sexual Assault, told NPR.
While the CDC has not explicitly stated why the RPE program’s funding was stalled, other cuts within the organization have been made under President Donald Trump’s ban on diversity, equity and inclusion programs. In a memo sent to federal workers on Jan. 29, employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were instructed to remove any content related to gender identity from the organizations’ websites. As a result, webpages like Health Disparities Among LQBTQ Youth, and Fast Facts: HIV and Transgender People were scrubbed.
The president also issued a freeze on all federal grant and loan programs to allow higher ups within the government time to review each program to determine its ideological synergy with the administration. Flagged words such as “historically,” “women,” and “equity,” have reportedly been cause for some grants to be pulled, The Washington Post reports.
The Rape Crisis Center industry operates on “very narrow margins,” Jones said, and while large benefactor gifts can vary from year to year, federal grants are generally a reliable foundation for organizations' annual budget decisions.
In the first weeks of the Trump administration, executive orders and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have taken a baseball bat to Congressionally appropriated federal spending. Cost cutting at the National Institutes of Health and Center for Disease Control are estimated to add up to billions, thousands of federal workers have been offered buyouts to lessen workforce bloat and Musk and Trump have both made sweeping — albeit unsubstantiated — claims of waste and fraud across the federal government.
Waste and fraud simply isn’t the case amongst rape crisis centers, Jones said. The RPE grant acts as a reimbursement fund, meaning the hundreds of thousands of dollars promised to organizations are a cost that has already been incurred by the groups.
It’s nonprofit work that no one is expecting to get rich doing, she adds.
“We're talking about providing services to our community that no one else is providing. It's not like there's a for-profit business or company that's doing this and then we're trying to do it on the government’s dime. No, nobody's doing this,” Jones said. “There's a lot of talk about government waste, but I can assure you nonprofits, especially these rape crisis centers, operate with very narrow margins. We are so careful and efficient and there's just not a lot of extra floating around here.”
