The Federal Government's Police Hiring Fund Rejects Nearly Two-Thirds of the Departments That Apply

Right now, a police chief in a small city is filling out the same form a predecessor filled out in 1995: an application to the federal government to help pay for a new officer's salary.▸ The FY 2026 COPS Hiring Program window is open — first-part applications are due July 23, completed packages July 29 — and the notice of funding opportunity puts the whole program's expected size at $157,594,000, enough for an anticipated 250 awards nationwide. Last year's cycle shows what that number means for the department filling out the form: most of them don't get funded.

The COPS Hiring Program (CHP) Post-Award Fact Sheet for FY2025 is exact about what happened: the COPS Office received 615 applications from state, local, and tribal agencies and funded 228 of them — 39 large departments, 189 small ones — for a combined $161,330,965, enough to hire or rehire 1,155 full-time officers and deputies, 73 of them school resource officers.▸ The other 387 agencies that asked got nothing this cycle.

The mechanics of the award are generous, on paper: CHP will cover up to 75% of an approved officer's entry-level salary and fringe benefits for three years, capped at $125,000 in federal money per position, with the department covering the rest.▸ It is, structurally, one of the more direct subsidies the federal government offers any local government function — Washington paying most of the cost of a specific public employee's salary for three years running. It is also, by design, capped at whatever Congress appropriates, and Congress appropriated enough in FY2025 to reach 37% of the departments that asked.

The program exists to address a real shortage.▸ State and local law enforcement employment peaked at 711,387 officers in 2019, then fell for four straight years before a partial rebound, according to the Census Bureau's Annual Survey of Public Employment and Payroll, as compiled in a 2026 Congressional Research Service report on the COPS program. By 2023 the country was down to 668,375 sworn officers — a loss of 43,012 in four years. 2024 brought the corps back up to 697,749, but that is still 13,638 officers short of where the count stood in 2019.

Put the two numbers next to each other and the scale problem is plain: a CHP cycle that funds 1,155 positions is closing under a tenth of the gap between 2024's headcount and the 2019 peak — and that's if every funded position were a net-new hire rather than a rehire of someone already on staff.▸ The COPS Office notes it has been appropriated more than $21 billion since 1994 and funded the hiring or redeployment of more than 141,000 officers over that entire 32-year span — a pace of roughly 4,400 officers a year, against a national force that is still short by more than three times that many relative to just five years ago.

The money itself has also shrunk relative to its own history.▸ Per the CRS report, the COPS program's hiring-specific appropriation averaged over $1.2 billion a year from 1995 to 1999, when the Clinton administration was funding the initial push toward 100,000 new community-policing officers. By 2015 that hiring line had fallen to $135 million; the FY2026 figure of $157.6 million is a modest recovery from there, but still a fraction — about an eighth — of where the program's hiring budget started three decades ago, even as the number of agencies competing for it has only grown.

Officer counts are calendar-year Census Bureau payroll survey figures and are not directly comparable to COPS grant cycles, which run on the federal fiscal year; the two are placed side by side here to show relative scale, not a precise year-over-year offset. FY2025 CHP figures are finalized awards; FY2026 figures are the program's own funding notice, published before this year's awards have been made.