Image: North Carolina State Senator Woodson Bradley

North Carolina received $103 million in federal victim services money in 2018, money that pays for domestic violence shelters and child advocacy centers. By 2024 the award had fallen more than 42 percent to $24.6 million, the sixth straight year of decline, with shelters considering layoffs. Then on April 22, 2025, the Justice Department terminated more than 365 grants worth roughly $811 million nationwide, with victim services among the programs cut off.

North Carolina State Senator Woodson Bradley figured out how the state can start replacing that funding and keep those shelters and victim services running, without raising taxes. She filed Senate Bill 719, the North Carolina Victims of Crime Assistance Act, in March 2025, a month before the terminations, and refiled it as Senate Bill 794. The bill creates a state fund, administered through the Governor’s Crime Commission, that awards competitive grants to the same organizations, and it directs money from criminal court costs and marriage license fees into the fund.

The federal money came from the Crime Victims Fund, which Congress created in 1984 under the Victims of Crime Act and funded with fines and penalties collected from federal criminal defendants. For years, when the Justice Department settled corporate cases through deferred and non-prosecution agreements, those penalties went to the general Treasury instead of the fund, and the awards to states shrank. Congress redirected those penalties into the fund in 2021, and the awards kept falling anyway. Then the Trump administration went after what remained. Federal agencies circulated banned-word lists that flagged terms including “victims” and “gender.” The Justice Department pulled money from the Center for Victim Research and from a program that supplied free sign language interpretation for crime victims. Then it tried to withhold roughly $1.4 billion in Victims of Crime Act grants from any state that refused to help ICE. The grants it tried to hold back pay for domestic violence shelters and victim advocates. It abandoned the plan in October only after 20 attorneys general sued.

North Carolina Republicans had already diverted victim services money once. Bradley wrote on her own Substack about a ProPublica investigation into a 2021 budget maneuver that moved $15 million in victim services funding away from the agencies that had long administered it and into the Human Trafficking Commission, then a two-person operation inside the state court system. People who worked for the commission and the legislature warned it would be overwhelmed, and it was: of 18 crisis centers ProPublica interviewed, 15 reported funding delays that harmed their work, centers cut staff and services, and as of March 2025 most were still waiting for their full funding. One center had to stop paying for a hotel for a trafficking victim, and the woman went back to her trafficker.

Court costs and marriage license fees are non-tax revenue, so the fund survives an appropriation fight and an oppositional federal government. The court costs also keep the burden where the federal fund put it, on offenders rather than on taxpayers. Congress wrote that principle into the Crime Victims Fund: people who commit crimes pay for services to the people they harmed. Bradley kept the principle and applied it at the state level.

Senator Bradley won the only seat in Mecklenburg County that Republicans left competitive when they drew the 2023 map, winning it by 209 votes out of 124,311 cast in a district where registration runs 33 percent Republican and 27 percent Democratic, with 40 percent unaffiliated. Stacie McGinn, the former general counsel to the Mecklenburg County Republican Party, requested a recount, and the recount confirmed Bradley’s win. The two of them face each other again in November. Bradley sponsored more legislation than any other freshman in the chamber during her first session, and she has the 2026 endorsement of the Charlotte Firefighters Association. She calls her politics Team Normal, and when we talked about what that means in regard to public safety she put the argument in one sentence: “you can be all about public safety and still keep our blue values and talk openly about it.” Senate Bill 719 is her proof that the two go together.

You don’t have to live in North Carolina to support Senator Bradley. Follow her at Woodson’s Substack, where she writes from inside the session, and watch her TEDx talk on the story that brought her to this work. Support her campaign from wherever you live at woodsonbradley.com.

We want to promote more of the people who are doing things right: state legislators, city council members, county and state chairs, and the leaders of activist organizations. If you want to be considered for a feature, just send me a direct message here on Substack.

CALL TO ACTION

The Trump administration cut federal victim services grants in 2025. North Carolina State Senator Woodson Bradley has the fix: Senate Bill 719, the North Carolina Victims of Crime Assistance Act, paid for by criminal court costs and marriage license fees instead of taxes, and any state legislator can file the same bill.

Who you are contacting: your state senator and your state representative. Find them at OpenStates by entering your address, and each listing includes email and phone.

What you are asking for: that they file this bill in your state.

How: email, a call, or a printed letter if you want it on someone’s desk. If you get a form reply or a non-answer, that counts as a no: you can write back once and ask the question again.

When you write or call, cover these points in your own words, because a legislative office reads a hundred identical messages as one message and a letter that sounds like a constituent as a hundred:

Your name and where you live in their district
Your state lost the same federal victim services funding that every state did
North Carolina’s Senate Bill 719 replaces part of it with criminal court costs and marriage license fees, and it raises no taxes
Why this matters to you
Whether they will file the same bill, and when you can follow up