No Federal Crime Funds for Cities That Cut Police Budgets or Limit Cash Bail

The “No Funding for Lawless Jurisdictions Act” is a direct financial shot across the bow aimed at cities and states that have pushed for criminal justice reform, specifically around bail and police spending. Essentially, this bill uses federal grant money as leverage to dictate local policy on pre-trial detention and law enforcement budgets. If you live in an urban area, this could very quickly affect how your local government operates and what your tax dollars fund.

The Federal Strings Attached to Bail Reform

This is the part that hits bail reform efforts hard. Starting next fiscal year, states and cities lose out on certain grants from the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act if they have policies that do two things. First, they can’t "substantially limit cash bail" for a whole list of serious crimes the bill calls “covered offenses.” Second, they can’t allow a judge to release someone previously convicted of a felony solely on their own recognizance (their promise to return to court).

For the average person, this means if your local government recently reformed its bail system to reduce the reliance on cash bail—say, for non-violent offenses—they might be forced to roll those reforms back or lose out on critical federal funding. The bill’s definition of a “covered offense” is broad, including not just murder and rape, but also things like carjacking, burglary, and even "rioting or encouraging riots." This means that for a wide range of crimes, cash bail has to remain a viable option, effectively restricting local judicial discretion and potentially keeping more low-income defendants in jail pre-trial simply because they can’t afford bail, even if a judge otherwise deems them low risk.

Hands Off the Police Budget

The second major restriction targets police department budgets in urbanized areas. If your local government—defined here as a “covered jurisdiction”—cut its law enforcement budget during the previous fiscal year, it also loses access to these federal grants. This provision is designed to halt the "defund the police" movement by making it financially painful for cities to reallocate money away from police departments.

There’s a small exception: a city can still get the funds if the budget cut happened because the entire municipal government faced a financial shortfall, and the cut was applied equally across all government departments. But proving that a budget cut was applied "fairly across all government departments" could become a bureaucratic nightmare. For city leaders trying to manage rising costs and competing priorities, this effectively locks police budgets in place, regardless of local needs or political mandates.

The Real-World Trade-Off

What this bill really does is create a forced choice for local governments. They can keep their local criminal justice reforms—like reducing reliance on cash bail—but they risk losing out on federal grants that often fund things like drug treatment courts, community policing initiatives, or technology upgrades. If a city decides to prioritize the federal funding, they must reverse those reforms, likely leading to higher pre-trial detention rates and increased jail costs. If they stick with the reforms, taxpayers in that city might have to cover the gap left by the lost federal money.

This is a classic example of the federal government using its checkbook to enforce a national standard on issues that are traditionally local. For residents, the immediate impact is a loss of local control and potentially less funding for community-focused crime prevention programs if the local police budget is deemed insufficient or if bail reforms are too progressive for the Attorney General’s interpretation of “substantially limit cash bail.”