The bill creates two related grant streams administered by the Office on Violence Against Women (OVW): a pilot program funding local consortia that pair technical partners with domestic-violence or sexual-violence service providers to prevent and respond to technology-enabled abuse, and a separate grant program to develop training, curricula, and technical assistance for advocates. The pilot emphasizes practical interventions—buying devices for survivors, integrating technologists into service networks, and building locally tailored responses.
Why it matters: the statute targets a growing but under-resourced problem—stalkerware, online harassment, device surveillance, and other tech‑enabled tactics—and builds federal funding and an evaluative framework around local, multi‑disciplinary partnerships. For compliance officers, service providers, and campus programs, the bill creates concrete funding opportunities, reporting requirements, and collaboration expectations that will shape how technical assistance is delivered to survivors.
At a Glance
What It Does
Authorizes OVW to award up to 15 pilot grants (maximum $2 million each) to eligible consortia that combine higher‑education or private‑sector technical partners with domestic‑violence or sexual‑violence service providers. Separately authorizes up to $20 million in total for education and training grants over a five‑year period.
Who It Affects
Domestic‑violence and sexual‑violence service providers, institutions of higher education and private tech partners that recruit technologists or volunteers, nonprofit trainers, and the Office on Violence Against Women as grant administrator. Local, State, Tribal, or territorial governments must provide letters of support for pilot applications.
Why It Matters
The bill channels federal resources into practical, local tech‑safety work and establishes a formal evaluation cadence (interim and post‑pilot reports) that could produce playbooks for nationwide replication—or reveal limits to tech‑centric approaches to survivor safety.
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What This Bill Actually Does
The bill defines eligible consortia narrowly: a technical partner (either one or more institutions of higher education with relevant programs or private/public sector partners with technical workforces and recruitment plans) must team with one or more domestic‑violence or sexual‑violence centers and secure a letter of support from the local, State, Tribal, or territorial government where activities will occur. That structure is meant to ensure each project pairs technical capacity with front‑line victim services and a modicum of local political buy‑in.
OVW must establish a pilot under which it may award grants of up to $2 million, with no more than 15 awardees total. Grants may be used to combat technological abuse broadly, explicitly including purchase of new devices for victims and any other services that reduce technological abuse or assist survivors.
OVW must consult with HHS, the Department of Education, and the FCC and solicit input from stakeholder groups and population‑specific service providers when designing the pilot.The pilot is time‑limited: it ends five years after the first award. OVW must submit an interim report to relevant Congressional committees not later than three years after the first award that reviews efficacy, identifies implementation challenges and potential solutions, and recommends whether to make the pilot permanent.
After the pilot ends, OVW must provide a final review within one year that catalogs best practices and needed improvements.Separately, OVW will run a grants program to fund nonprofit organizations and institutions of higher education to develop curricula, tools, and technical assistance for those supporting victims of technological abuse. That stream may total up to $20 million in awards over a five‑year period.
The bill allows pilot recipients to also receive education grants. Both programs carry open appropriations language—"such sums as necessary"—for authorized activities.
The Five Things You Need to Know
The pilot grants are capped at $2,000,000 per award and OVW may issue no more than 15 such grants.
An eligible consortium must pair a technical partner (a higher‑education program or private/public sector technical workforce with a recruitment plan) with one or more domestic‑violence or sexual‑violence centers and include a local, State, Tribal, or territorial government letter of support.
The pilot terminates five years after the date of the first award; OVW must deliver an interim efficacy report at 3 years and a final report within 1 year after termination.
A separate education grant program is authorized for nonprofits and institutions of higher education, with a total award ceiling of $20,000,000 over a five‑year grant period, and pilot grantees remain eligible for these education grants.
OVW must consult with HHS, the Department of Education, and the FCC and solicit input from population‑specific and technological‑abuse stakeholders when designing and launching the pilot.
Section-by-Section Breakdown
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Key definitions and eligibility scaffolding
This section sets definitions that matter for who can apply: "eligible consortium" requires both a technical partner (either an institution of higher education with relevant programs or a private/public sector technical partner with a plan for recruiting technologists or volunteers) and a domestic‑violence or sexual‑violence center. It also imports the statutory definition of "technological abuse" from the Violence Against Women Act; that import ties the pilot to existing VAWA concepts and victim service definitions.
Pilot program authority, consultation, and application process
OVW must establish the pilot and may award grants to eligible consortia after consulting with HHS, Education, and the FCC and after soliciting stakeholder input. The bill leaves application timing and content to OVW's reasonable discretion, which means OVW will set selection criteria and reporting obligations—an implementation detail that will determine how technical capacity and survivor safety are weighed.
Permitted uses of funds and evaluation deadlines
Grantees can use funds to purchase devices for survivors and for any services that reduce technological abuse or assist survivors, giving wide discretion over interventions. OVW must produce an interim report within three years assessing efficacy and implementation challenges and a final report within one year after the pilot ends; the pilot itself ends five years after the first award. These reporting deadlines create a built‑in evaluation cadence intended to surface best practices and inform Congressional decisions on permanence.
Funding mechanism
Instead of a fixed appropriation, the bill authorizes "such sums as are necessary" to carry out the pilot. That language authorizes funding but leaves the amount and timing to future appropriations—meaning the program's scale depends on Congress' budgeting choices.
Separate grants for education, training, and technical assistance
OVW must also run a grant program for nonprofits and institutions of higher education to develop training materials, curricula, tools, and technical assistance. The statute caps total awards at $20 million over five years and explicitly allows pilot recipients to also receive these education grants, encouraging overlap between field pilots and training development.
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Explore Technology 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
- Survivors of domestic, dating, sexual violence, and stalking — will gain access to targeted technical interventions (e.g., secure devices, removal of stalkerware) and services designed to mitigate surveillance and online harassment.
- Domestic‑violence and sexual‑violence service providers — receive funding to partner with technologists, broaden service offerings, and integrate tech‑safety into casework without shouldering full development costs.
- Institutions of higher education and technical partners — get paid, applied opportunities for students and staff to work on real‑world safety challenges and to pilot technical solutions in partnership with community providers.
- Nonprofit trainers and curriculum developers — benefit from the $20 million education grant stream to build standardized training, toolkits, and technical assistance for advocates across jurisdictions.
- Policymakers and researchers — gain structured, evaluated pilot data (interim and final reports) that can inform broader program design and potential federal scale‑up.
Who Bears the Cost
- OVW and partner federal agencies (HHS, Education, FCC) — will absorb administration, consultation, and oversight work without allocated baseline funding in the text, increasing agency workload and policy coordination demands.
- Small and grassroots victim service providers — may face competition from better‑resourced organizations for limited grants and must invest staff time to form consortia and meet application/reporting requirements.
- Technical partners and institutions — must recruit technologists or volunteers and supervise applied work, which creates program management, liability, and confidentiality responsibilities.
- Local, State, Tribal, and territorial governments — required to issue letters of support for pilot applications, which could impose political or administrative costs in jurisdictions wary of formal endorsement.
- Grantees — must manage safety‑critical work (device distribution, diagnostics, data handling) that carries operational risk and potential legal exposure if privacy or confidentiality is compromised.
Key Issues
The Core Tension
The central dilemma is trade‑off between rapidly scaling technical responses to a pervasive, evolving form of abuse and safeguarding survivor privacy and safety: stronger, widely deployed technical interventions can reduce surveillance in some cases but also create new data trails, operational risks, and equity gaps if better‑resourced organizations dominate grant awards. The bill pushes federal funding and evaluation toward solutions but leaves the hardest questions of implementation—consent, data governance, and equitable access—to agencies and grantees.
The bill gives OVW broad discretion on application criteria, allowable uses, and grant administration, but it leaves crucial implementation choices undefined: selection weighting (technical sophistication vs. survivor‑centered design), standards for safe device distribution, and protocols for data handling are all delegated to the agency. Those gaps create variability in how "tech safety" will be operationalized and increase the risk that projects prioritize technological novelty over survivor privacy.
Funding architecture is another unresolved tension. The pilot and training streams use different ceilings (per‑award cap and $20 million total) and open‑ended authorization language for appropriations.
That structure authorizes but does not guarantee funding; program scale, geographic reach, and sustainability will depend on appropriations and OVW's prioritization. The requirement for government letters of support can help coordination but risks excluding communities where formal government endorsement is politically or practically difficult.
Finally, integrating volunteers and students into sensitive survivor work raises confidentiality, consent, and professional‑ethics questions that the statute does not address, leaving grantees to define guardrails under pressure to show impact.
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