This story was originally published by the Trace, a non-profit newsroom covering gun violence in America. Sign up for its newsletters here.
Since his return to office last year, Donald Trump has pardoned dozens of white-collar criminals. He’s also forgiven their fines, penalties and restitution, to the tune of billions. Some of that revenue was supposed to go to a fund to help victims of violent crime – and the organizations that serve them are feeling the pinch.
The Crime Victims Fund, established in 1984 by the Victims of Crime Act, or VOCA, is sustained by criminal fines and penalties from convictions in federal cases, typically white-collar prosecutions. All of that money is required by law to be deposited into the fund. The money is distributed to state and local programs including domestic violence shelters, rape crisis centers and child abuse treatment programs. Gun violence survivors and the families of victims who died rely routinely on VOCA funding to reimburse medical expenses, funeral costs and lost wages.
Slashing corporate fines means less money for the Crime Victims Fund. The Trace analyzed all 117 of Trump’s pardons and commutations issued so far in his second term. We verified through court records whether the defendants’ criminal fines were paid – or whether Trump issued a pardon before the debt could be satisfied. According to our calculations, at least $113m in forgiven fines and penalties would have gone into the fund absent a Trump pardon. This figure does not include restitution, which goes directly to crime victims.
Most of that figure is from a single case. Last year, Trump pardoned HDR Global Trading Limited, the owner and operator of the crypto exchange BitMEX, which had been ordered to pay $100m in fines for flouting anti-money laundering laws. Trump issued the pardon, the first for a corporation, just hours before the payment was due. Because the pardon calls for the “remission of any and all fines, penalties, forfeitures, and restitution ordered by the Court”, that $100m will never make it to the Crime Victims Fund.
“What really drives the fund are these very large, very few cases, which are all corporate cases,” said Steve Derene, who co-founded the National Association of VOCA Assistance Administrators and had a hand in shaping the 1984 legislation. He cited a 2017 settlement with Volkswagen for cheating on emissions tests that made the German automaker pay a $2.8bn criminal fine – resulting in a windfall for the Crime Victims Fund. Derene said two-thirds of all the money deposited into the fund since its inception has come from only 90 cases. “Just a couple settlements can really mean the difference in keeping this fund afloat.”
The “remission of any and all fines” – which means someone can stop paying – is not typical language for a presidential pardon. None of Trump’s pardons in his first term called for the remission of fines, yet a third of his pardons this term do.
Going forward, this shift toward debt forgiveness for white-collar criminals could deprive the fund of a vital source of revenue. Notably, “remission” doesn’t mean refund. Criminal fines and penalties cannot be refunded once they’ve been deposited into the Crime Victims Fund, a judge recently ruled in a case brought by two of Trump’s pardon recipients who sued to get some of their money back.
Some of the fines levied on Trump’s pardon recipients weren’t forgiven, including a $50m payment from the CEO of Binance, another crypto exchange, to settle money laundering violations. But Trump’s pardons threaten to deprive the fund in other ways. Several pardon recipients hadn’t been to trial before they received clemency, so a criminal fine had yet to be levied. That means the amount of money the fund has lost is likely greater than the $113m we calculated.
Derene, who was a VOCA administrator in Wisconsin for many years, is concerned that Trump’s pardons of white-collar criminals will discourage federal prosecutors from taking up the cases that tend to yield big fines – as all of that work could be erased with a stroke of the president’s pen. “We don’t know what cases they’re not bringing,” he said.
The $113m in fines that Trump has forgiven over the past 14 months is far more than the fines forgiven by Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden, during his entire four-year term. Biden’s pardon recipients had incurred less than $1m in financial penalties, and because most of them had served their sentences decades before, their fines were already paid. The only cases Biden’s pardons interrupted involved foreign nationals released as part of prisoner exchanges with other countries.
A sum like $113m could make a big difference to states and territories, all of which are allocated money from the Crime Victims Fund based on population. More than a third of them received less than $10m last year. The fund has been especially stretched since the pandemic, leaving states to search for other sources of revenue.
Maine’s governor, Janet Mills, included in her most recent budget proposal a $6m annual allocation for the state’s crime victims to make up for the VOCA shortfall. Some VOCA-funded programs in Oklahoma reported 80% reductions in funding over the past decade. Pennsylvania’s domestic violence programs were hit with a 7.5% reduction in VOCA funding for the coming year. Sexual assault survivor organizations in New Mexico asked the state to step in with $2m to cover a VOCA shortfall.
The amount of money in the fund fluctuates depending on the number of federal prosecutions. In 2000, Congress placed a cap on funds available for distribution each year to keep some money in the bank during leaner times. So the fund does remain relatively stable, no matter who’s in office, but payouts fluctuate along with the funding cap.
In 2021, the fund allocated more than $3.7bn to crime victim service programs, according to federal data. By 2024, that figure was down to nearly $2.2bn – a decrease of about 40%. Less money means fewer victims helped: Nearly 10 million people were served by VOCA-funded organizations in 2021; in 2024, it was 7.1 million.
“The decline in VOCA funding has created significant uncertainty for victim service providers,” said Michaela Weber, executive director of Victim Support Services, a non-profit in Washington state that provides advocacy services to victims of violent crimes– and gets most of its funding from VOCA. “For organizations like ours, it means making difficult decisions about staffing, capacity, and how many victims we can realistically serve at any given time.”
Obtaining VOCA assistance is already difficult. Only 6% of violent crime survivors aged 12 or older attempt to access victim compensation programs, according to the Center For American Progress, a left-leaning thinktank. The low participation stems from limited awareness of VOCA programs – especially in Black and brown communities – an arduous application process, and strict eligibility criteria that exclude victims with criminal histories, among other barriers.
“Victim service organizations are often the bridge between individuals in crisis and the systems they need to navigate – legal, medical, and financial,” Weber said. “When that bridge is strained and victims don’t receive timely support, the ripple effects can impact their safety, stability, and long-term recovery.”
Mother Jones has reported that the fund has also struggled because federal prosecutors have pursued more non-prosecution agreements and deferred prosecutions in recent decades, which give defendants more time to pay up or let them avoid charges entirely in exchange for cooperating with the government.
Meanwhile, Senate Republicans blame the Biden administration for failing to collect $1bn in outstanding fines and penalties – money that would have gone into the Crime Victims Fund. The justice department has also identified almost $10bn in additional criminal fines and penalties that remain unpaid. At GOP senators’ urging last year, the department issued guidance to prosecutors on the process of collecting fines. Chuck Grassley, a Republican senator, asked then-attorney general, Pam Bondi, for an update in February, but it’s unclear if the department has provided one. Grassley’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
Congress is considering allowing the Crime Victims Fund to tap into money collected from people convicted of defrauding the government. The bill, the Crime Victims Fund Stabilization Act, passed the House in January and now sits in the Senate.
But there are other, more political reasons for the fund’s shortfall, including Trump’s sweeping cuts to the federal workforce. “If you look at what’s happening to the justice department these days, the prosecutors, the assistant U.S. attorneys, the people who are tasked with collecting that money have either been fired, quit, or they’re doing immigration work,” Derene, the VOCA guru, told the Trace.
White-collar prosecutions have dipped precipitously since 2011, most steeply during Trump’s time in office, according to data compiled by the non-profit Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. Trump’s justice department has also dropped an unprecedented number of criminal cases to free up staff to focus on immigration. In the first six months of his administration, according to a recent ProPublica analysis, the justice department declined to prosecute 23,000 cases, most of which had been referred by law enforcement agencies under previous administrations. That number includes more than 900 cases of federal program or procurement fraud. “As a practical matter, if you’re looking at the low level of cases that are being brought, I think that’s what may have a significant impact in the immediate future,” Derene said.
As of February 2026, the Crime Victims Fund’s balance was over $3.6bn – higher than when Biden was in office. But historical data reveals that the fund plummeted during Trump’s first term. According to figures from the 0ffice of justice programs, which administers the fund, it had a balance of $3.1bn in 2009, when George W Bush left office. By the time Barack Obama finished his second term in 2017, the fund was at an all-time high of $13bn. Four years later, when Trump exited, it was back down to $3bn.
VOCA was spearheaded by a Republican president, Ronald Reagan, and the legislation was crafted through bipartisan compromise. Derene always believed the federal government decided which criminal cases to pursue based on good faith, not partisanship, he said. “I’m not so willing to say that now.”
Leave a Comment