Trump Directs Federal Support for Police Hiring and Retention During National Police Week

WASHINGTON, May 13, 2026 — President Donald J. Trump issued a statement declaring that his administration’s restoration of federal support for law enforcement has reversed the prior policy of reduced funding and public criticism directed at police departments.

The statement, released by the White House on National Police Week, identifies roughly 18,000 state and local law enforcement agencies across the United States as the population affected. It references the reversal of funding cuts that occurred between 2021 and 2024, when federal grants for hiring, retention bonuses, bulletproof vests and training programs declined by several hundred million dollars annually according to prior congressional appropriations records.

The operational change restores emphasis on existing Department of Justice programs that provide direct grants to police departments. These include the Community Oriented Policing Services hiring program and the Byrne Justice Assistance Grant formula funding, which together previously supported several thousand additional officers each year before the reductions.

The restored policy takes effect immediately through executive direction of agency spending priorities and does not require new legislation.

Downstream, the Department of Justice must now prioritize award decisions for the current fiscal year’s grant cycles, which run through September 30 2026. State and local governments that rely on these matching funds will adjust their budgets to rehire officers or restore overtime pay that had been frozen.

Congress faces renewed pressure to appropriate specific dollar amounts in the fiscal 2027 budget to sustain the restored levels beyond the current year. Courts handling civil liability cases involving officers will continue to operate under the same qualified immunity standards that the statement says were undermined during the prior administration.

This marks the formal end of the policy shift that began after the 2020 protests when multiple cities and the prior federal administration cut police budgets or restricted certain enforcement practices. The original Byrne and COPS grant structures were created by legislation passed in the 1990s and have been reauthorized multiple times by Congress since then.