No active solicitation right now. Competitive awards. Multi-agency partnerships are strongly favored. Labs are typically a required partner in the application team, not the lead applicant.
Browse active grants →Funds jurisdictions to address unsubmitted or partially tested sexual assault kits through evidence testing, investigation, victim notification, and case progression. Typically requires a multi-agency team approach.
Apply directly on grants.gov, no state intermediary. The FY25 notice lists state law enforcement agencies, units of local government, prosecutor's offices and government agencies acting as their fiscal agents as applicants, so a crime lab usually joins the application as a team partner rather than applying itself.
Official program pageState, local, tribal, and territorial governments and agencies. Multi-partner applications encouraged — typically a law enforcement agency partnered with a lab, prosecutor, and victim services organization.
FY2025: 47 applications received, no awards made yet.
Awards per year: FY2021 24 · FY2022 20 · FY2023 30 · FY2024 25 · 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.
Explicitly name law enforcement agencies, prosecutor offices, victim advocacy organizations, and crime labs as formal partners with signed MOUs, demonstrating a coordinated community response to kit backlogs. Reviewers score proposals higher when each partner's specific role in testing, investigation, and victim notification is clearly delineated.
Provide an exact count of untested kits by jurisdiction, collection date ranges, and storage location to establish credibility and urgency. Include a realistic, milestone-driven testing timeline that aligns lab capacity, current staffing, and instrument throughput with projected monthly completion rates.
Avoid submitting a plan that focuses solely on laboratory throughput without addressing how survivors will be notified of test results and connected to trauma-informed support services, as BJA explicitly requires a victim-centered approach. Applications lacking a documented notification and advocacy component are routinely scored poorly or deemed non-competitive.
Do not submit line-item costs without tying each expense—reagents, overtime, CODIS upload fees, or equipment leases—directly to a specific program objective or kit processing milestone. Unsubstantiated or lump-sum budget categories signal poor fiscal management and can trigger budget cuts or outright disqualification during review.
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.
