DOGE Cuts Come for N.C. Domestic Violence Orgs

Erin Passailaigue glances at the boxes in the entryway of the Safe from Abuse and Family Education office, or SAFE, in Lenoir County, which provides intimate partner violence services for both Lenoir and Greene counties. There’s a cabbage in one box. A carton of eggs in another. 

Some people stop at the Kinston location to donate, while others come by and take what they need: clothing, sheets and blankets, used bath towels, stuffed animals. They’re things most of us barely think about, but that people running from an abuser often leave behind and must now replace as they build new lives.

As SAFE’s executive director, Passailaigue spends long days working as a bridge between her clients’ old lives and the hoped-for new ones. 

“We’re not just a Band-Aid,” she said. “We really try to give them the opportunity to completely change their lives and to give them the grace and space to do so.”

SAFE’s services include a staffed, 24-hour live hotline, a shelter, crisis counseling, advocacy, safety planning, and connections to other service providers. SAFE’s four employees prepare protective orders, accompany clients to court, spend hours on a full lethality assessment that predicts the likelihood of serious harm or death for a victim, and take calls to help de-escalate a situation. 

All of it is free. In fiscal year 2024, they served 748 survivors, a 13 percent increase from the previous year. And like many nonprofits these days, they’re now being asked to do more with less.

SAFE is one of 93 intimate partner violence programs across North Carolina, all of which saw more than 40 percent in cuts from the federal Crime Victims Fund in each of the past two funding cycles. It’s the result of congressionally appropriated cuts that began in 2019, according to the N.C. Coalition Against Domestic Violence, an organization that advocates for service providers in the state. 

Even more cuts may be on the horizon, given President Donald Trump’s aim to cut all nondefense discretionary federal funding by 22.6 percent. If passed, the proposed budget would also reduce the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control’s budget, another funding source that shelters rely on. Add the “reduction in force” notices that have nearly shuttered the federal offices that administer domestic violence-related funding, and the outlook is alarming.

“Our members have exhausted cushions and rainy-day funds,” said Kathleen Lockwood, the state coalition’s policy director. “They’re already at a skeletal level, where if some of those other sources are under attack, it threatens not just the programming but the very existence of these agencies.”

A major source of funding for domestic violence services in the state, the Victims of Crime Act (VOCA), has plummeted from a high of $103 million in 2018 to $24.6 million in 2024 as more of the white-collar crimes that have funded VOCA are settled rather than being brought to trial. 

Now, shelters are facing a cliff. They’re laying off staff—sometimes doubling the workload for those who remain—and closing offices. Most have cut anti-domestic violence training at high schools, doctors’ offices, and law enforcement divisions, which are intended to help young people recognize abusive behavior and support professionals on how to respond with compassion and empathy for people in dangerous relationships. 

Service providers are also cutting victim counseling and court advocacy programs that help people apply for protective orders to keep themselves safe during the most dangerous time with an abuser—the moment someone tries to leave. In other words, they’re forced to cancel their prevention efforts and only help people already in crisis. The uncertainty is causing a mad scramble, making planning difficult in an already unpredictable business.

Meanwhile, reports of intimate partner abuse have increased. Demand for services had already skyrocketed during COVID, growing 72 percent between 2018 and 2022, according to the coalition. While it has fallen back somewhat since the pandemic, the need is still 24 percent higher than in 2018. Last year, victims in the state presenting with signs of physical assault were up 47 percent from 2023, Passailaigue said. Intimate partner sexual assault was up 27 percent. Bullying, both verbal and cyber, is up 142 percent. Stalking has risen 59 percent. 

At the most extreme end, domestic violence murders in the state have jumped 75 percent from 2018 to 2024, according to the coalition. Last year, there were a record 93 domestic violence murders in North Carolina, or one every four days, and most involved firearms. As of May 7, the coalition said it had found evidence of 28 murders and 11 suicides this year.

“The severity has increased since the pandemic,” Passailaigue said. “Everybody is in survival mode.”

Doing More With Less

On Passailaigue’s desk is a stack of file folders stuffed with paper-clipped financial reports for funders. Beneath those are manila envelopes full of the information she hands out when she gives talks. A 3-inch binder holds more reports, more protocols, more details demanding attention. Behind her is a stuffed gnome in bunny ears, a gift from a coworker trying to improve morale. Taped to a cabinet beneath it is a feelings wheel, a tool for her and her staff to use as they talk people through a crisis and toward healing and rebuilding. 

On any given day, she will help a woman escaping from the man who beat her, and a man trying to understand that, yes, his partner’s belittling insults are indeed abuse. She’ll sign employee time sheets, show an intern how to scan paperwork, and coach the shelter manager on leadership. She’ll confirm that there are enough employees still there to cover shelter shifts for the week. She’ll shop for property insurance and navigate pay for an employee during a family medical issue. 

She’ll also comfort, console, and advise a walk-in woman in crisis, because everyone else is already stretched too thin, and do what she can to cheer and support her exhausted coworkers. It’s often midnight by the time she completes all the paperwork tied to grant applications and reports. And tomorrow she’ll start over, trying to stretch scant resources to meet the never-ending needs of both counties the agency serves.

Under the current Republican administration and the chainsaw of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), every piece of her job got harder as federal funding plummeted due to budget cuts and the offices that manage it are RIF’d into nonexistence. Federal dollars, which used to provide about 50 percent of her budget, now cover only about 20 percent, and even that is unstable. 

On April 1, the coalition learned that DOGE decimated the staff at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Division of Violence Prevention and put the director of the office that administers the only federal funding source dedicated to domestic violence services on administrative leave, with the option to take reassignment to an unidentified “area of greater need,” according to a statement from the coalition. 

Now, additional positions under the Department of Justice, including the Office of Justice Programs and the Office on Violence Against Women, have been terminated and programming consolidated. The fear is that funding through both VOCA and the Violence Against Women Act will be terminated or reduced as well.

“[People] keep telling us, you need to diversify [your sources of income,] you need to do more fundraisers, you can get donations in-kind,” Passailaigue said. “I’ll go to Food Lion or Piggly Wiggly, and they usually help, but if there are more reductions, I don’t know what I’m going to do. There are only so many doughnuts you can sell, so many car washes. That’s a lot of work for $500. If we have to cut anything else, I have to roll up this office.”

That would mean moving the remaining employees into the agency’s 4,000-square-foot shelter, displacing clients who may need those rooms. They’d also have to beg for office space in the county courthouse so that the public still has a place to find them, as the location of the shelter is confidential. 

Passailaigue worries, and she works. On any given day, she and her dedicated coworkers will speak to representatives from the human resources department at the local manufacturing plant, helping them understand the impact of abuse on their workforce. Her team drops literature at the clinic and the library, and explains to anyone who will listen: Abuse doesn’t begin with a fist. They’ll describe coercive control–how one partner increasingly dictates whom the other can talk to, where they go, what they wear, and when and whether they can work. She’ll define gaslighting and give examples. All of these are abusive behaviors. Her message? Don’t wait until someone gets hit.

SAFE’s shelter is located in a former doctor’s office, a brick ranch with a clinical addition onto the back, with beds and bunks arranged around the remaining exam rooms’ counters and sinks. With trundle beds and portable cribs, it can sleep 14. The kitchen is stocked with some combination of milk, eggs, bread, grits, cereal, and sandwich meat. Once a quarter, the N.C. Department of Agriculture & Consumer Services provides a load of food, including fresh and canned meat, frozen or canned fruits, peanut butter and fish sticks–all of which has to be kept separate from SAFE’s regular pantry food so that staff can document daily freezer and dry storage inventory and temperature checks. 

The youth organization at Kinston’s First Presbyterian Church also delivers stacks of peanut butter and jelly or meat and cheese sandwiches once a month, plus snack bags for the children. The walls of the living room, which is used for training and group meetings, are lined with boxes of stuffed animals and packs of household necessities for when clients move out. 

Surveillance cameras guard each door, and the local police are on standby. Each client who comes in is accepted on probationary basis for 48 hours to make sure they don’t cause massive stress to the other residents, some of whom are rape or sex trafficking victims. If someone’s presence causes agitation, the agency finds them alternative safe shelter and provides case management services there, further straining staff members’ time. 

Clients can stay up to 90 days, provided they’re working toward their stated goals. Any longer than that, and it’s considered transitional housing, which would require a separate set of grant applications, project management, and expenditure reports, and SAFE does not have the manpower. Instead, they try to refer people to a homeless shelter or to the Baptist Children’s Homes of North Carolina’s Kennedy Home, although that organization won’t take boys near the age of 13, Passailaigue said, nor anyone with even the smallest of past criminal charges. 

“We try not to put anyone out on the streets,” she said, “but sometimes that’s what they choose.”

The organization has a donated Dodge Caravan with more than 300,000 miles on it, but Passailaigue rarely has a spare staffer to drive clients to appointments, services, or court. There’s no real public transportation here, either, just a Lenoir County transit van that costs $5 per person per trip and has to be booked 24 hours in advance. 

Everything here is held together by the sheer determination of the people doing this work. Passailaigue, who has a bachelor’s degree in business administration from East Carolina University, is paid about $57,000 a year to do the job. Her shelter aides make $9.50 an hour.

“Obviously I could go work somewhere else,” she said. “But how often do you get to do work that’s meaningful, that you can actually see people’s lives being changed?”

A Nadir of Funding

The federal Crime Victims Fund, established via the Victims of Crime Act in 1984, collects fines primarily from white-collar crimes and distributes them to the states based on census data. At its peak in 2018, $103 million went into the state’s Crime Victims Fund, which was then distributed to service providers across the state.

But since prosecutions are at a 20-year low, that money has become increasingly scarce.

In fiscal year 2024, the state got only $24.6 million, a drop of more than 76 percent. That has left many agencies to focus on post-abuse intervention, not prevention and training to reduce violence. 

The Crime Victims Fund is only one stream of federal income. Agencies braid together funding from the Violence Against Women Act, which in 2024 provided more than $15.8 million to 23 programs in the state; the Family Violence Prevention and Services Act, which provided slightly more than $4 million in state and tribal grants; and the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Continuum of Care program, which can provide funding for services to people who become homeless because of abuse—the number one cause of homelessness for women and girls, Passailaigue said.

But all of those funding sources are now at risk as their administrative offices are shuttered by DOGE, since there are now no personnel to administer the programs.

The N.C. Coalition surveyed all 93 domestic violence programs in the state on potential federal cuts. Of the 43 programs that answered by early March, 49 percent reported they could only continue operating for 60 days or fewer without that funding.

“We are looking at the cliff that very many agencies have already fallen off of,” said Courtney Cottrell, executive director of Albemarle Hopeline, Inc., in Elizabeth City, which covers Camden, Chowan, Currituck, Gates, Pasquotank, and Perquimans counties. “The needs of survivors are complex, and they need so much more than immediate safe shelter. They need long-term supportive services.”

Her agency offers a nine-bedroom shelter that can hold up to 30 people, rapid rehousing that works to move clients quickly into stable housing, and legal services. The Crime Victims Fund has provided about a third of its $1.8 million budget in recent years. Another 40 percent of its budget comes through the state’s Council for Women & Youth Involvement. The rest comes from private foundations, donations, local governments, fundraising, and a thrift store. 

“This isn’t something we’re going to bake sale our way out of,” Cottrell said, noting that the market uncertainty means individuals and foundations have less to give. “And I have no idea whether DOGE will cut DV services.

“Someone asked, ‘Why would you put all of your eggs in one basket?’” she said of the drop from the Crime Victim Fund. “Because that’s what that basket is for! It was supposed to be a stable source.”

Albemarle Hopeline had planned to start offering sexual assault exams in-house rather than at the hospital and to expand legal services addressing custody and divorce. 

“We’re having to pull back on the reins of all of those services, which is devastating to me,” Cottrell said. “It literally breaks my heart.”

On the other side of the state, the Center for Domestic Peace in Jackson County started providing services in 2020, when Victims of Crime Act funding was at its nadir. Executive Director Wesley Myers recognized immediately that he had to look at more state, local, corporate, and philanthropic funding. 

“Starting at that lowest drop helped me understand that this was not a sustainable, reliable thing we could guarantee for our staff and community,” he said. “When things pop up like our state government changes or economic conditions change, we can rely on another funder to see us through.”

Both Western Carolina University and Jackson County have been supportive of the agency, which serves about 400 people a year on a budget of about $750,000. The university provides a constant stream of interns and encourages student groups to fundraise, and the county is helping to fund the building of a new shelter, providing more than $2.7 million through the pandemic-era American Rescue Plan Act. The remainder of the $5.3 million project is being covered by Dogwood Health Trust, a nonprofit corporation whose stated mission is to improve the health and well-being of people and communities across Western North Carolina. The shelter will be furnished through a combination of charitable contributions.

“We will respond as we must,” Myers said. He said the center may have to cut back on services like therapy and counseling, and programs that provide prevention education in schools. “We are looking at what is vital and required by state and local government and cutting other things, which disadvantages our community.” 

The N.C. Coalition Against Domestic Violence was in the third year of a five-year grant through the CDC when it learned that DOGE had gutted its violence prevention program. Grantees are required to file an annual progress report, but now Executive Director Carianne Fisher said she’s not even sure who will review it. 

Cottrell of Albemarle Hopeline worries about what will happen if DOGE goes after more programs that fund organizations like hers.

“We are going to go back 40 years, to the ’70s and earlier, before hotlines started, before emergency shelters,” she said. “Victims are going to suffer, and homicides are going to increase dramatically. Sometimes when we’re talking about [domestic violence], they think we’re just talking about hitting and slapping, but we’re talking about murder, strangulation, and torture. These are very important issues, and victims need help.

“It’s hard enough to run programs to help them without having to keep track of everything that’s happening in D.C. and wondering where your next dollar is coming from.”

Janine Latus is an award-winning journalist, author, and advocate best known for her international bestseller, If I Am Missing or Dead, which tells the story of two sisters who grew up to fall victim to angry and controlling men. She has written for magazines like O, Parents, Fitness, Smithsonian.com and Saturday Evening Post.