The Justice Department Cut $36.5 Million From the Volunteers Who Speak for Abused Kids in Court

A Court Appointed Special Advocate is a volunteer, not a lawyer or a caseworker.▸ A judge appoints one to a single child's case, and that volunteer's only job is to learn everything about that child's life and tell the court what's actually in the kid's best interest — the one consistent adult voice in a case a judge otherwise sees for twenty minutes every few months. The network of local nonprofits that recruit, train, and supervise those volunteers has run for decades on a small, steady federal grant. On April 22, 2025, the Justice Department cut it off.

Per USASpending.gov, the National CASA Association held exactly three active cooperative agreements with the Justice Department's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) in the spring of 2025: an $8.87 million award for national training and technical assistance and a $16.47 million award for state and local subgrants, both signed September 27, 2024, plus an older $11.17 million training, membership, and accreditation agreement signed in 2021.▸ Combined, $36.5 million — money already obligated, running through 2026 and 2027 on paper.

National CASA/GAL's own notice to its network says the department terminated "three grants" effective April 22, 2025, telling the organization to stop charging costs to the awards immediately.▸ The department's stated reason, per reporting on the termination notices: the programs no longer "effectuate the program goals or agency priorities."

The damage didn't stay at the national office.▸ National CASA/GAL's own May 2025 statement says 101 state and local CASA/GAL organizations had their own current subgrants terminated outright, and another 275 grants to local programs — already in the pipeline — were never awarded at all. National CASA/GAL now says it operates "with a much smaller staff."

Zoom out and the cut looks even starker, because the federal CASA line item was never a big number relative to what it funded.▸ Under the Assistance Listing that covers the whole CASA program (16.756), total federal obligations peaked at $23.67 million in FY2022 — a one-time bump — and had already settled back to roughly $15 million a year by FY2023 and FY2024. USASpending.gov's obligations history for the listing shows no figure at all for FY2025: not a small number, no number.

Even at its FY2022 peak, the entire national CASA program cost less than a quarter of what the federal government pays out in a single day of many larger benefit programs.▸ The volunteers it funds are not a fringe service — judges assign them specifically because they're the only party in the courtroom whose sole job is the child, not the parents' rights, the agency's caseload, or the state's liability. Cutting the program didn't require a large sum of money; it required deciding a small one wasn't worth keeping.

Even before the cut, CASA/GAL volunteers reached a minority of the children who move through the child welfare system in a given year.▸ National CASA/GAL's 2023 Annual Report counts 79,000 volunteers across 939 state and local member programs serving 201,000 children that year. In the same rough window — federal fiscal year 2024 — the HHS Administration for Children and Families' AFCARS Dashboard counted 505,682 children served by the foster care system nationwide over the course of the year, and 328,947 still in care on the last day of it.

The two figures come from different years — 2023 for CASA/GAL, federal fiscal 2024 for AFCARS, a roughly one-year offset that's the best alignment each source's own published data allows — but both measure the same kind of thing: children served over the course of a year, not a caseload snapshot.▸ By that measure, CASA/GAL volunteers were already reaching well under half the children the foster care system processes annually. Cutting the program's federal funding doesn't just freeze that gap; local programs losing subgrants recruit and train fewer new volunteers, so the gap grows.

Dollar figures are award-level federal obligations as recorded on USASpending.gov, not necessarily amounts actually disbursed before the termination. The "children served" comparison pairs the two most recent years each source has published (CY2023 for CASA/GAL, FFY2024 for AFCARS) and should be read as an order-of-magnitude comparison, not an exact same-year match.