The ongoing tax and budget negotiations on Capitol Hill amd the “one big, beautiful bill” that knits together Republican spending priorities are exposing deep rifts within the GOP, including a sharp divide over how much to cut Medicaid and food assistance.
Much attention has centered on how these cuts would impact public health and well-being, including potentially devastating effects for mental health and opioid treatment, the costs of nursing homes, income inequality and child hunger.
But it’s not just health in the crosshairs — public safety is too. If lawmakers pass the package as it stands now, their actions are likely to increase crime nationwide, in red states, blue states, cities, rural areas and everywhere in between.
As researchers, our work focuses on the “social determinants of safety,” the underlying social and economic factors that affect the likelihood of crime, violence, and community stability. By addressing the building blocks of safe communities, including education, youth programs, health services, the built environment and economic stability, states can meaningfully prevent violence and save billions in downstream costs from jailing and hospitalization.
In many cases, these investments may not seem directly related to public safety. It’s not obvious, for example, that a grant for home repairs in low-income neighborhoods might help reduce homicides by more than 20 percent. It’s also not immediately obvious why something as simple as summer jobs might reduce youth arrests for violent crime by 43 percent.
But this is exactly what our research shows. When we put streetlights over a dark alley, fewer crimes take place there. When people can access mental health and addiction treatment, they’re less likely to face arrests and jail. And many parents would agree that to keep a teenager safe and trouble-free, few things beat investing in a nearby park or a basketball hoop.
Overall, these social determinants create a delicate ecosystem that keeps crime down. Solidify these building blocks, you enhance safety. But pull one thread, you put everyone at risk.
That’s why the Republicans’ tax and budget package is so dangerous. The package being debated would cut $625 billion from Medicaid, potentially causing 10.3 million Americans to lose health care coverage. And it would slash the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program by roughly 30 percent, removing food aid from millions.
Both programs have been directly linked to crime reduction.
One study showed that expanded Medicaid access reduces crime by roughly 3 percent annually, producing crime-related cost savings of $13 billion each year. Other research shows that Medicaid can reduce recidivism for violent offenses by as much as 16 percent while also yielding significant reductions in robbery, aggravated assaults and larceny theft. Other studies show that expanded access to mental health and addiction treatment reduces violent and financially motivated crimes.
Nutrition access also has major benefits. A New Orleans study showed that individuals facing food insecurity are 13.5 times more likely to be involved in domestic violence than those who were food secure. And at a time when gun violence is the leading cause of death for children and teens, another study showed that food insecurity is linked with more gun injuries.
In short, cutting these programs will likely cause crime and violence to increase. It could also produce cascading effects.
For example, as states look to backfill Medicaid and SNAP (formerly “food stamps”), they may pull funding from other programs that contribute to crime reduction. Or they may find that other programs, such as diversion programs that connect people to treatment rather than jail, can’t work when treatment isn’t available.
The proposed Medicaid cuts are an assault on today’s most cutting-edge safety programs. Medicaid is increasingly used to fund evidence-based programs such as community violence intervention, alternative crisis response and diversion programs focused on mental health and addiction, which deploy social workers, credible messengers and other professionals to interrupt crises, foster rehabilitation, and break the cycle of violence.
Violent crime in the U.S. is now hovering near historic lows. In Baltimore, homicides are down 40 percent since 2020 — a striking decline that local leaders largely attribute to these programs. In other places, community violence intervention has cut gun violence by 70 percent.
Community-based intervention and response programs have been key to our public safety gains in both urban and rural areas. With the recent Department of Justice funding freezes and Health and Human Services program cuts, we can’t afford to further undermine the revenue sources that keep these life-saving programs going.
We’ve reached an inflection point on how, or whether, we choose to keep our families safe.
We can reduce investments in the interventions that have fueled improvements in community safety, or we can keep moving forward by reversing recent funding cuts, rejecting Medicaid and SNAP budget reductions and scaling up our commitment to evidence-based safety.
Thea Sebastian is the founding executive director of the Futures Institute and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Hanna Love is a fellow at the Brookings Institution.