As candidates debate public safety ahead of the midterm elections, a new assessment of the nation’s historic homicide decline suggests there is no single explanation for the drop — and that some widely discussed enforcement strategies may have played little role.

A survey of nearly 50 crime scholars convened by the nonpartisan Council on Criminal Justice found the strongest support that the top contributing factors to the drop in homicide rates have been community violence intervention programs, the easing of pandemic-related disruptions, and focused deterrence strategies that pair law enforcement with social services.

The findings come amid a historic national decline in homicide. In 2025, the estimated U.S. murder and nonnegligent manslaughter rate fell 18.1% compared with 2024, which equates to about 4 killings per 100,000 people. It tied the lowest rate recorded since national estimates began. The FBI recorded the same rate in 1955 and 1956. 

But a national decline does not mean every community has experienced the same drop.

The decline has unfolded in cities with different public safety strategies, economic conditions and political leadership, complicating efforts to credit any one approach, according to the council’s report.

The researchers rated 48 potential explanations for the decline between 2022 and 2026. Six factors received support from more than two-thirds of respondents as contributing either substantially or to a limited degree:

• Expanded community violence intervention programs, which work directly with people at highest risk of violence, were rated as either a major or a limited contributor contributing by 91% of researchers. 
• The pandemic recovery was rated as a major or a limited contributor by 83% of respondents. It was the only factor that a majority of respondents, 57%, rated as a major contributor.
• Eighty-three percent of the crime scholars gave credit to the increased use of focused deterrence, an approach that targets high-risk individuals and groups directly with a carrot-and-stick approach through social support and law enforcement.
• Researchers also pointed to increased local government capacity to provide social services, with 75% rating it either a major or limited contributor.
• Greater public safety and support resources relative to demand earned a rating of 68%.
• And more proactive policing was likewise named as a major or limited factor by 68% of the scholars.

Researchers largely dismissed more than half of the potential explanations, including National Guard deployments, increased immigration enforcement and increased pretrial detention. 

Other factors thought to have contributed little included homeless encampment removals, improved housing stability, electronic monitoring, GLP-1 medications, declining cash use, presidential public safety signals, DNA databases, neighborhood crime alerts and increased incarceration.

The findings do not establish that any one strategy caused homicide to fall. The ratings reflect researchers’ professional judgments, not definitive findings, and multiple factors may have overlapped or reinforced one another, according to the council’s report. 

The council also cautioned that a factor judged to have contributed little to the recent decline could still help reduce violence in the future.

But understanding what drove the decline could help policymakers determine how to sustain the progress, according to the council’s report. 

“Theories and claims abound, and sorting among them is essential if we’re going to sustain the progress. This diverse array of researchers took the challenge seriously, testing competing explanations, debating the evidence, and making tough judgments,” Adam Gelb, the president and CEO of the council, said in a news release. “Their effort leaves the country with a much clearer picture of what likely contributed, what probably did not, and what we still need to learn.” 

Stateline reporter Amanda Watford can be reached at awatford@stateline.org.

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration must spend the $810 million that it said last week it planned to cancel, according to a report released Tuesday by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office. 

The congressional watchdog’s decision contends the White House budget office doesn’t hold the ability to claw back that funding without approval from Congress. 

“Any withholding of appropriated funds beyond their date of expiration, regardless of size, subverts both the constitutional process for enacting federal law and Congress’s constitutional power of the purse,” wrote GAO General Counsel Edda Emmanuelli Perez.

Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought disagreed with the decision, though he wrote in a social media post it was not “a surprise.”

“GAO has become hyper partisan and Congress recently attempted to cut their spending because of it,” Vought wrote. “GAO changed its long-time opinion on this very issue from the 1970s when they specifically noted the tool was available to the president. They make their legal assessments based on whether Democrats are in the White House.”

‘Pocket rescission’

A federal law known as the Impoundment Control Act allows the White House to ask Congress to cancel funding that lawmakers previously approved and the president signed into law.  

Lawmakers have 45 days after the rescission request is sent to decide whether they want to approve it in full or modify the proposal. Congress declining to take any action means lawmakers have rejected the plans and the administration must spend the money. 

A request sent during the last 45 days of the federal fiscal year, which ends on Sept. 30, is known as a pocket rescission. 

The Trump administration believes that sending a rescissions request during that timeframe allows it to cancel the funding regardless of whether lawmakers sign off on the plan. 

The GAO has disagreed with that opinion before and reiterated it Tuesday in its five-page decision.

“The Constitution vests in Congress the power of the purse, and Congress did not cede this important power through the ICA,” Perez wrote.  

“Instead, the terms of the ICA are strictly limited,” she added. “The ICA permits only the temporary withholding of budget authority and provides that unless Congress rescinds the amounts at issue, they must be made available for obligation. The President cannot rely on the authority in the ICA to withhold amounts from obligation, while simultaneously disregarding the ICA’s limitations.”

Refugee aid programs

The rescissions request the Trump administration sent Congress on Friday proposed lawmakers cancel funding for several line items, including refugee assistance programs at the Department of Health and Human Services, a Treasury Department program that provided “debt forgiveness to foreign countries that make climate change-related investments for coral reefs and tropical forests” and a grant program at the Minority Business Development Agency.

The administration submitted its first pocket rescissions request in August 2025 and cancelled $4.9 billion without congressional action. 

That came a few months after the White House budget office successfully worked with Republican lawmakers to rescind $9 billion in funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and certain foreign aid accounts. 

States, cities and counties filed a pair of lawsuits Monday challenging new federal rules that will allow immigrants’ use of safety net resources to be taken into account for green cards and other applications to stay in or enter the country.

The new federal policy goes into effect Friday and broadens the discretion of immigration officers reviewing applications for green cards, certain visas or admissions into the U.S., allowing officers to consider enrollment in public benefits, such as housing and food assistance, Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, as something called “public charge.” 

When officers determine a person could become dependent on government benefits, that “public charge” is a ground for inadmissibility under federal law. Such non-cash benefits were previously restricted from public charge consideration under the Biden administration. 

The Trump administration rescinded that 2022 policy, arguing that it is protecting taxpayer dollars and expects immigrants to be self-sufficient.

Both lawsuits were filed against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. 

Many mixed-status households are expected to forgo benefits and disenroll from programs, causing U.S. citizen dependents, including children, to lose care and benefits for which they’re legally entitled to receive, experts and state officials say.

In their lawsuit, 22 states and the District of Columbia pointed to DHS estimates that say states nationwide may lose roughly $4.05 billion in annual federal transfer payments for Medicaid and CHIP programs alone. Of that nationwide total, the plaintiffs may stand to lose about $2.2 billion in reduced federal payments. 

The states include Colorado, Connecticut, California, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin.

Due to disenrollments, states nationwide could lose about $1 billion in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Of that, the plaintiff states could lose $575 million in reduced federal payments.

The states argue that the new rules contain many ambiguities and will cause the states to“ultimately be forced to fill the breach” by funding gaps out of their own budgets, leading to “staggering” costs.

Along with losing federal funding due to disenrollments from state programs, public agencies will face administrative costs, the states argue, and as households forgo enrolling in benefits, such as preventative healthcare and nutritional assistance, including school lunches, public health will suffer, leading to an increase in disease prevalence and driving up the costs of medical care, they argue.

In a separate lawsuit, a coalition of cities and counties — New York City; Chicago; San Francisco; Santa Clara County, California; Seattle and King County, Washington — say the new rule is unlawful in reversing “longstanding limits on public charge determinations.” Roughly 1.3 million people, including 600,000 children, could lose care and coverage in those places, the suit argues.

New York City, which led the cities’ lawsuit, estimates it would see 6,000 fewer annual primary care visits. 

“The new public charge rule seeks to push immigrant families away from the programs that have kept people fed and healthy for decades,” New York City Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani said in a news release. “New Yorkers will be afraid to see a doctor or ask for help they are legally entitled to. That fear will not stop at the families that the federal government is targeting. Families who remain fully eligible for benefits will feel a chilling effect and all New Yorkers will pay for it.”

The coalition also argues that children would be forced to withdraw from free or low-cost education programs. It notes that about 19% of Seattle residents and 26% of King County residents rely on such programs.

Stateline reporter Nada Hassanein can be reached at nhassanein@stateline.org.