The Government Wants to Cut Crime Lab Grants 71% While the Backlog Grows

In Colorado, the average sexual-assault kit sat 570 days — about a year and a half — before testing, with more than 1,200 kits still waiting, according to the state's own crime lab data reported by Stateline in July 2025.▸ Colorado is not an outlier; it's the national pattern rendered in one state's numbers. Crime labs process the physical evidence that decides whether a case moves forward at all — DNA, drugs, firearms, fingerprints — and nationally, the people and money behind that work are both short.

The federal government's main grant line for helping state and local crime labs modernize equipment, train staff, and clear backlogs is the Paul Coverdell Forensic Science Improvement Grants Program.▸ It has been funded at $34 million a year since at least FY2024. The FY2026 Budget and Performance Summary the Department of Justice submitted to Congress requests $10 million for it instead — a cut of $24 million, or 71% — and proposes rewriting the appropriations language itself to read "$10,000,000" in place of "$34,000,000." The same budget cuts a companion line, "other federal, state, and local forensic activities," from $15 million to $10 million.

Not every forensic funding line takes the same hit.▸ The same budget holds the $120 million DNA Analysis and Capacity Enhancement Program — the Debbie Smith DNA Backlog Grant Program, named for the 2000 law that created it — exactly flat, and keeps $51.5 million for the separate Sexual Assault Kit Initiative unchanged too. The cut lands specifically on Coverdell, the program whose grants can be spent on the unglamorous work of hiring analysts, replacing aging equipment, and clearing routine casework — the grant most directly tied to backlog and staffing, not headline DNA cases.

Every five or six years, the Bureau of Justice Statistics counts every publicly funded crime lab in the country — 326 labs and multilab systems (423 individual labs) as of the most recent count — and asks how many requests for forensic testing sat unresolved more than 30 days after submission.▸ At the end of 2020, the answer was 710,900. That's down from 895,500 at the end of 2009, but up 25% from the 570,100 recorded at the end of 2014 — the backlog got worse across the 2010s, not better.

The composition shifted toward the disciplines that decide violent-crime cases: from 2014 to 2020, the backlog in firearms and toolmarks analysis rose 97%, DNA databasing of arrested and convicted persons rose 87%, and controlled-substances analysis — the single largest category, at 260,600 requests — rose 22%.▸ BJS notes some of the 2014-to-2020 increase reflects labs suspending operations during the COVID-19 pandemic, but the underlying trend predates it: demand for forensic services has consistently outpaced the labs' ability to process requests within 30 days.

None of that backlog gets cleared without analysts to do the work, and the analysts aren't there.▸ Crime labs nationwide employed 15,620 full-time- equivalent staff at yearend 2020, and had about 1,530 job vacancies open at the same moment — despite 1,210 hires that year outnumbering 1,120 separations, the net gain wasn't enough to close the gap.

State-run labs — which employ the most staff and handle nearly 60% of all requests nationwide — accounted for 41% of every vacancy, on top of carrying 43% of the workforce.▸ Sixty-two percent of all crime lab employees are analysts or examiners, the people who actually process evidence and testify in court; the rest are managers, technicians, and support staff. Colorado's 570-day kit turnaround isn't a mystery once you see the staffing numbers behind it — the state's own toxicology program manager attributed the delays to the same shortage of trained analysts that shows up in the national census.

The 2020 census is the most recently published BJS count of publicly funded crime labs; a 2024 data-collection round was underway as of 2025 but had not yet produced a public report as of this writing. Coverdell and DNA program figures reflect the FY2026 President's Budget request submitted to Congress, not final enacted appropriations, which Congress can and often does revise.