The bill adds a new Part OO to Title I of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 to authorize a federal grant program for Adverse Childhood Experiences Response Teams (ACERTs). The Attorney General, coordinating with the Secretary of Health and Human Services, may award grants to states, local governments, Indian Tribes, and neighborhood or community-based organizations to establish teams and deliver trauma-informed responses.
This program matters because it directs federal crime‑control funding toward cross‑system, trauma-informed interventions—training first responders, creating referral networks, and promoting coordination among law enforcement, mental health, schools, and child welfare. The authorization contains a modest funding ceiling and leaves key implementation choices—selection criteria, reporting, and evaluation—to the Attorney General’s discretion, which will shape how the program operates on the ground.
At a Glance
What It Does
The bill authorizes grants to create and support Adverse Childhood Experiences Response Teams. It lists eligible activities—protocol development, referral agreements, integrated law-enforcement/mental-health responses, training, cross-system planning, and technical assistance—and gives the Attorney General authority to set application requirements.
Who It Affects
Eligible grantees are States, units of local government, Indian Tribes, and neighborhood or community-based organizations; affected systems include law enforcement, behavioral health and substance-use providers, child welfare, schools, courts, EMS, and public health agencies that participate in or partner with ACERTs.
Why It Matters
The measure channels federal criminal‑justice grant dollars into trauma-informed, community-level responses—shifting some program emphasis from enforcement to coordination and care. How the Attorney General defines eligibility, awards grants, and monitors performance will determine whether the program strengthens local capacity or simply subsidizes short-term projects.
More articles like this one.
A weekly email with all the latest developments on this topic.
What This Bill Actually Does
The bill inserts a new Part OO into Title I of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act to create a discrete grant program for Adverse Childhood Experiences Response Teams (ACERTs). The Attorney General is the grantmaker and is instructed to coordinate with HHS; eligible applicants include state and local governments, tribes, and neighborhood or community-based organizations.
The text is concise: it authorizes grants, lists permissible uses, requires an application in the form the Attorney General prescribes, and authorizes a funding ceiling.
Permissible uses are broad and operational: grantees may establish standardized protocols for responding to children exposed to trauma, negotiate referral agreements with behavioral-health and substance-use treatment providers, integrate law enforcement with mental health and crisis services, implement comprehensive supportive programs for affected children, identify local access barriers to trauma-informed care, train a range of responders and community partners, coordinate across multiple systems (courts, child welfare, reentry, EMS, public health), and provide technical assistance to other communities and agencies. Those categories are intentionally expansive, giving grantees flexibility to design local models.The bill sets out only a few administrative guardrails.
Applicants must submit information in the Attorney General’s requested form, but the statute omits any explicit competitive vs. formula allocation method, reporting requirements, performance metrics, matching-fund obligations, or sunset review beyond the four-year authorization period. The authorization is limited in scale compared with national need, and the legislation makes plain that final program design—who wins grants, how large grants are, what outcomes are tracked—will come through agency rulemaking and grant guidance rather than the statute itself.
The Five Things You Need to Know
The bill adds Part OO to Title I and creates Section 3051, entitled “Grants for Adverse Childhood Experiences Response Teams.”, Eligible grantees are explicitly States, units of local government, Indian Tribes, and neighborhood or community-based organizations.
The statute enumerates eight categories of allowable activities, including protocol development, interagency integration, referral partnerships with behavioral‑health and substance‑use providers, training, and technical assistance.
The application requirement is open-ended: applicants must submit the form and information the Attorney General “may reasonably require,” leaving application design to DOJ discretion.
Congress authorizes $10,000,000 per fiscal year for each of FY2026 through FY2029 to carry out the program (authorization, not an appropriation).
Section-by-Section Breakdown
Every bill we cover gets an analysis of its key sections.
Creation of ACERT grant program
This new Part OO is the statutory home for the program and makes the authority permanent within Title I unless later amended. Placing the program in the Omnibus Crime Control framework signals that Congress envisions ACERTs as part of the broader public-safety grant portfolio, not solely a public-health initiative, which affects eligible funding sources and administrative oversight.
Grants authorized and coordinating agencies
Subsection (a) directs the Attorney General to make grants and explicitly requires coordination with the Secretary of HHS. That dual-agency reference creates an expectation of interagency collaboration but does not prescribe a governance or joint-rulemaking model. The subsection also defines the pool of eligible recipients—states, local governments, tribes, and community organizations—while leaving grant size, award method, and priority criteria to DOJ policy.
Permissible uses of grant funds
Subsection (b) lists eight specific allowable uses, from creating response protocols to training and technical assistance. Each bullet is programmatic and operational: for example, the statute contemplates formal referral agreements with behavioral-health and substance-use providers and integration of law enforcement with crisis services. That specificity authorizes a mix of planning, capacity-building, workforce training, cross-system processes, and direct service coordination, but it does not cap administrative costs or set minimum proportions for services versus planning.
Application process
Subsection (c) requires applicants to submit applications in the form and containing the information the Attorney General reasonably requires. This gives DOJ wide latitude to require performance plans, budgets, partnership letters, or evidence of community need, but the statute contains no timeline for application review, appeal rights, or criteria that must be used to evaluate applications—mechanics that will be determinative in practice.
Authorization of appropriations
Subsection (d) authorizes $10 million annually for FY2026–FY2029. That figure is an authorization ceiling; actual funding depends on subsequent appropriations. The four‑year authorization both establishes a short-term funding horizon and requires Congress to reauthorize or appropriate further funds after 2029 for sustained programming.
This bill is one of many.
Codify tracks hundreds of bills on Justice across all five countries.
Explore Justice in Codify Search →Who Benefits and Who Bears the Cost
Every bill creates winners and losers. Here's who stands to gain and who bears the cost.
Who Benefits
- Children and youth exposed to trauma: the statute explicitly funds teams and programs designed to identify, refer, and support children exposed to adverse experiences, which can increase access to trauma-informed care and coordinated services.
- Community-based organizations: neighborhood and community-based organizations are eligible grantees, creating a direct funding pathway for local non-profits that provide culturally specific or grassroots trauma supports.
- Behavioral-health and substance-use treatment providers: the law encourages formal referral agreements and integration, which can increase referrals and create more consistent pathways from first contact to treatment.
- First responders and front-line professionals: the bill funds trauma-informed training for law enforcement, EMS, child-protective workers, educators, and victim-service providers, improving frontline capacity to identify and respond to trauma.
- Indian Tribes: tribes are named as eligible recipients, which recognizes tribal sovereignty and provides a federal funding channel for tribal-specific ACERT models.
Who Bears the Cost
- Department of Justice and HHS: the Attorney General and Secretary of HHS will have administrative and coordination responsibilities that require staff time and interagency processes, likely funded from existing agency budgets unless appropriations provide for administration.
- State and local governments: municipalities and states applying for grants will bear application, matching (if later required), and sustainability costs—especially if programming continues after the authorization period.
- Community organizations with limited grant capacity: smaller neighborhood groups may face administrative burdens to meet DOJ application and reporting requirements, potentially necessitating investment in grant management.
- Law enforcement agencies: while training and integration are funded, operational responsibilities around integrated responses (e.g., co-responder models) may require departments to reallocate personnel or adapt policies.
- Congressional appropriations process: budget pressures mean funding this program at scale competes with other DOJ and HHS priorities, and the $10M annual authorization could displace or crowd in other community-safety initiatives depending on appropriators’ choices.
Key Issues
The Core Tension
The central dilemma is between flexibility and accountability: the bill intentionally gives grantees and the Attorney General broad discretion to design trauma‑response models tailored to local needs, but that flexibility comes at the cost of statutory standards for definitions, evaluation, and equitable distribution—raising the question of whether federal funding will catalyze durable, evidence-based systems or produce short-lived pilots without measurable outcomes.
The statute gives wide programmatic latitude but few implementation guardrails. It enumerates allowable activities in detail but omits definitions (for example, what qualifies as an ACERT, or how the statute defines “exposure to trauma”), selection criteria for competitive awards, reporting and evaluation requirements, or timelines for grants and renewals.
That combination—detailed permissible uses but limited statutory oversight—means DOJ rulemaking and grant guidance will effectively determine program priorities, award sizes, allowable administrative costs, and performance measures.
Funding is modest relative to national need and is authorized only for four fiscal years. The authorization level ($10 million annually) may support pilots in multiple jurisdictions but is unlikely to sustain widespread system change.
The statute also encourages integration of law enforcement with mental-health responses; without careful design, that integration risks substituting criminal-justice processes for public-health approaches, raising concerns about data sharing, privacy, and the potential for increased system contact for already‑vulnerable children. Tribal uptake and equity across urban, suburban, and rural communities will depend on DOJ’s application design and outreach, which the statute leaves to agency discretion.
Try it yourself.
Ask a question in plain English, or pick a topic below. Results in seconds.