Washington — The Justice Department is scrapping its longtime practice of hiring outside experts to help review and rank competitive grant applications submitted by law enforcement offices, victim services groups and research institutions, a move that some fear could harm the integrity of the selection process and hinder efforts to ensure the money is well-spent, multiple sources told CBS News.
The Justice Department’s Office of Justice Programs, or OJP, has for decades relied on a peer review program to help it select winners each year for its competitive pool of grant funds that get awarded to state and local governments, nonprofit victims services groups and criminal justice researchers.
The DOJ’s Office on Violence Against Women, or OVW, a smaller separate grant office, has also used peer reviewers for its competitive awards.
The Justice Department awards billions of dollars in federal grants each year. While some of those are doled out based on formulas such as population and crime rates, another bucket of them are competitively awarded.
Some of DOJ’s most popular competitive awards are used to fund projects by law enforcement agencies or to support organizations that assist victims of sexual assault, human trafficking and domestic violence.
Competitive grants are also awarded to universities that undertake studies that help inform best practices for the fields of law enforcement and victim services providers.
The peer review program, which is modeled after a grant review process created by the National Institutes of Health that is considered the gold standard, entails hiring independent subject matter experts who are tasked with reviewing, scoring and ranking grant applications.
They work to ensure that the proposals are feasible, meet the government’s criteria and that their budgets can adequately cover the work being performed.
Although peer reviewers’ recommendations are nonbinding, the process has been utilized for decades to ensure that competitive grants are awarded fairly and impartially.
Peer review “is one of the tools that the government could use to make good, sound, cost-effective decisions,” said Kristina Rose, who previously served as director of the Office for Victims of Crime, an OJP office that awards grants to help support organizations that offer services for the victims of crime.
She added that eliminating peer review is a blow in particular to the National Institute of Justice, which funds criminal justice research projects that are highly specialized and contain complex methodologies.
“If NIJ doesn’t have peer reviewers, that will diminish them in the eyes of the scientific community,” Rose said.
A Justice Department spokesperson confirmed to CBS News that it is planning to formally end its peer review program for competitive grants.
“Peer review has become an increasingly inefficient and outdated process that outsources a core function of our grantmaking process to individuals outside the Department who may not have insight into this Administration’s goals and priorities or a reason to pursue them,” a Justice Department spokesperson told CBS News.
The Justice Department’s peer review program will formally end in the fall, the sources said.
The peer review program for OJP and OVW is currently administered through two contracts with a company known as BETAH and its subcontractor, Leidos.
Going forward, staff at the OVW and OJP who are responsible for managing grant awards will now be tasked with conducting internal peer reviews of the applications for all competitive awards, the sources told CBS News.
In 2025, the use of outside peer reviewers was temporarily stopped, and OJP staff were ordered to do it themselves, even though many people had no expertise and had never conducted peer review, sources said. Sources described the process at the time as chaotic and stressful, with some people working late hours to complete the task.
Eventually, the use of external peer reviewers was restored.
A Leidos spokesperson said the company and its predecessor corporations have a “longstanding history supporting DOJ peer review activities” dating back to the mid-1980s for OJP and decades for OVW. The spokesperson said its contracts with OJP and OVW are currently active, with the OJP one running through Nov. 1 under a bridge order.
The decision internally was made as an attempt to cut costs for the Justice Department and to bring more expertise in-house, one of the sources said. The DOJ’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, which gives out competitive awards to law enforcement agencies, has been phasing out the use of peer reviewers since 2019, the source added.
The Justice Department spokesperson noted that the COPS office had already eliminated peer review “many years ago” and nevertheless has managed to “process grant applications and awards with speed and efficiency while maintaining alignment with the Make America Safe Again mission.”
“Bringing this function in-house also saves taxpayer dollars by cutting out unnecessary outside contractors,” the spokesperson added.
But the increased workload comes at a time when OJP’s staffing level is already down by approximately several hundred employees, one source said, and it is still struggling to finalize some grants for fiscal year 2025, which ended Sept. 30, 2025. They are also in the process of working to finalize fiscal 2026 awards before Sept. 30, while also rolling out some $3 billion in new grants required by last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
Moreover, some fear that eliminating outside experts from the review process could further risk politicizing how grants are awarded at a time when the White House has already directly intervened in the grantmaking process across the federal government.
“Grantmaking for victims services should not be based on political goals, but on best practices and demonstrable impact for victims and services,” said Jean Bruggeman, the co-executive director at Freedom Network USA who has also served as a peer reviewer in the past.
“Eliminating expertise allows you to focus on the administration’s goals — not the goals of Congress. Not the goal of victims and survivors. Not the goals of the program, but rather, the goals of the current administration,” Bruggeman said.
The peer review process is considered apolitical. However, over the years, there have been a few controversies and efforts to undermine the selection process by injecting political considerations into how awards are made.
During President Trump’s first administration, the union representing OJP workers filed a complaint with the Justice Department inspector general, alleging that a Trump appointee was screening the social media profiles of peer reviewers to ensure their views aligned with the Trump administration’s positions on issues including immigration.
In another controversy around the same time, the Justice Department faced internal complaints after the former head of OJP declined to award grants to two organizations that received high marks from peer reviewers and instead gave them to two groups that received low scores — Hookers for Jesus in Nevada and the Lincoln Tubman Foundation in South Carolina.
In the case of Hookers for Jesus, it received a $530,190 grant over three years to support its safe house for trafficking victims. It was awarded the grant even though it had previously lost Nevada Victims of Crime Act funds after the state discovered the group was forcing victims to attend one specific church and requiring them to participate in religious activities as a condition of receiving housing.
In another controversy dating back to President George W. Bush’s tenure, the former director for the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention granted awards to groups that received low peer review scores, including the World Golf Foundation’s “First Tee” program.
An inspector general investigation later faulted him for breaching ethics rules by accepting a free round of golf from the group before he recommended them for the grant award. He did not reimburse the group until two years later, when he was ordered to appear before Congress to answer questions about the grants.