Funds improvements to reporting, transportation, forensic processing, identification, and repatriation of missing persons and unidentified remains. Addresses the full case pipeline from recovery to identification.
Apply directly on grants.gov, no state intermediary. For statewide projects, accredited publicly funded crime, CODIS and toxicology labs and medical examiner offices can apply themselves, as can state governments, universities and nonprofits. Local projects are applied for by county or city governments; check the notice for the small, rural and tribal category.
Official program pageState, local, tribal, and territorial entities involved in missing persons and unidentified remains response. Medical examiner offices, law enforcement, and forensic labs are typical applicants.
FY2025: 44 applications received, no awards made yet.
Awards per year: FY2022 6 · FY2023 13 · FY2024 10 · FY2025 none yet
Round totals: DOJ Office of Justice Programs award data. Award lists: USAspending.gov, plus DOJ’s own award list for rounds USAspending is missing.
General advice for this program, not taken from the notice. The notice’s own review criteria are what reviewers actually score, so check these against it.
Provide specific numbers of current unidentified remains cases in your jurisdiction, including case age and cause-of-death data, to demonstrate measurable need and justify requested funding levels.
Explicitly outline how your lab will enter and maintain case data in the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs), including staff roles, timelines, and data quality checkpoints.
Do not request equipment or software without directly linking each item to specific unidentified remains case bottlenecks, as reviewers will reject proposals that lack clear operational justification.
Failing to include partnerships with medical examiners, law enforcement, or victim advocacy organizations signals an isolated approach that weakens your application's demonstrated capacity for comprehensive case resolution.
A starting list, not the official one. Each notice ends with its own application checklist, and that is the list to work from once a round opens.
