A Surprise Target of Trump’s Cutbacks Is Devastating One Specific Population

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As millions of Americans take to the streets in opposition to President Donald Trump, some of those most affected by his unpredictable, short-sighted, and transparently cruel policies are unable to participate. Since his first day in office, the Trump administration has thrown the lives of incarcerated people into chaos—especially the more than 150,000 people under the jurisdiction of the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

The BOP—the nation’s largest single prison system—has been in a “long-standing crisis” for more than a decade, according to a 2024 inspector general report outlining rampant problems from crumbling infrastructure to staff sexually assaulting incarcerated people. A massive AP investigation revealed that staff are often kept on the job despite accusations of, or even arrests for, criminal misconduct. And in an attempt to deal with staffing shortages, the BOP routinely forces nurses, cooks, teachers, and other nonsecurity staff to fill in as correctional officers, a dangerous strategy known as “augmentation.”

But incarcerated people and BOP experts say that in just a few short months, the Trump administration has exacerbated this crisis. He has implemented major pay cuts, issued confusing and short-sighted orders, directly targeted vulnerable incarcerated populations, and haphazardly slashed funding for crucial initiatives.

Trump’s shake-up started on Inauguration Day, when BOP Director Colette Peters was abruptly removed from office. Peters had been appointed in 2022, with a mandate to change the BOP’s toxic culture and establish “a vision for reform.” At least six other top BOP officials have since departed.

But vacancies at the staff level are even more dire. For years, the BOP has blamed its troubles on chronic, agencywide understaffing. In late 2023, 16 percent of correction officer jobs were vacant; an earlier analysis found prison health services jobs sat similarly unfilled. The jobs are hard to fill: Working in a prison is traumatic and stressful, with high rates of burnout, mental health issues, and turnover.

In 2024, the BOP managed to increase staff count by a net 1,200, thanks to aggressive recruiting efforts, including hiring and retention bonuses. But those efforts have collapsed under Trump, who implemented a federal hiring freeze and slashed existing retention bonuses for correctional officers, cutting officers’ take-home pay by as much as 25 percent. In the weeks leading up to the pay cuts, correctional union reps told reporters that staffers were already making plans to leave, including medical workers.

Meanwhile, Trump weakened federal jobs and unions by ending collective bargaining and making correctional officers “at-will” employees. In May, Trump’s newly appointed BOP director, William Marshall, announced plans to maintain current BOP staffing levels by effectively freezing most hiring at least through September, in an effort to “avoid more extreme measures.” None of this amounts to security for these jobs.

Simultaneously, Trump’s policies threaten to worsen overcrowding by widening the net of incarceration. The number of people incarcerated throughout the BOP has crept up in recent years, after nearly a decade of decline, causing federal facilities to be 10 percent overcrowded in 2024. Yet in January, Trump’s DOJ instructed federal prosecutors to pursue the harshest charges available in many instances (while laying off on white-collar crime).

People incarcerated in BOP facilities are already feeling the effects, including through the increased use of lockdowns, during which entire units are confined to cells for hours or days on end. In recent weeks, many federal prisons have implemented new policies, such as full-day lockdowns once a week, or nightly lockdowns starting at 6, according to reports sent by incarcerated people to the advocacy group More Than Our Crimes. These incarcerated writers often report that staff blame the new lockdowns on insufficient staffing or overtime bans.

“We just came off of a two-week lockdown, supposedly to save on overtime costs,” an incarcerated person wrote in May from FCI Waseca, a low-security women’s facility in Minnesota. “Now we are being [told] we will be locked down one week each month. … No work crews will run, there will be no programming, and if rec [is] open it will only be in the p.m.”

Others report their facilities reduced visitation hours, or even banned contact visits. “Beginning last weekend, there is no contact allowed during visits. You must sit in a row and they sit in a row, with a big plastic barrier in between,” one person wrote from FCI Allenwood in April. “Supposedly it’s due to short staffing and it will be that way until at least November!”

People in BOP facilities also report mail going missing or arriving late, and being charged for phone calls that should be free, according to the Federal Prison Education and Reform Alliance, an organization of former BOP staff advocating for reforms.

“Anything that adversely affects staffing is going to put incarcerated people further at risk,” said David Fathi, director of the ACLU National Prison Project. “Every aspect of prison operations requires adequate custody staff, whether it’s health care, or food service, or escorting people to exercise, or taking people to visiting. … And one way that some facilities deal with that—it’s a counterproductive way, but nevertheless—is with lockdowns.”

“These are big problems that lead to even bigger problems,” Hugh Hurwitz, who served as BOP acting director from 2018 to 2019, told Forbes in April. “You have a situation where inmates are angry and I know from what I am hearing that staff are angry. That is not a good combination on top of the issues with poor morale, staffing shortage, pressure to cut costs from the new administration and managing all this while trying to stick to the mission of security in the prisons. … It is a powder keg and a lot of people are worried about a big incident that may happen next.”

Incarcerated people, advocates, and BOP staff are also dealing with whiplash from abrupt, sometimes contradictory decrees from Trump and his Department of Justice.

In January, Trump rescinded a Biden order banning BOP contracts with private prisons. Before becoming attorney general, Pam Bondi lobbied extensively for GEO Group, a major private prison company—the latest glaring example in a long-standing revolving door between the industry and the BOP.

Incarcerated people and their loved ones were blindsided again in March. The 2007 Second Chance Act allows people to transition from prisons to the community, serving up to the final 12 months of their sentence in a halfway house. But citing budget constraints, the BOP issued a memo abruptly shortening this transition period to the final 60 days of a person’s sentence. As a result, people’s upcoming transfers to halfway houses were suddenly rescheduled back many months. Amid uproar from families and advocates, the administration rescinded the change just two weeks later.

“They said it was to save money. But it’s more expensive to keep people inside of prison than in a halfway house,” said Deborah Golden, a civil rights attorney. The episode was classic Trump: making announcements with little forethought and a short-sighted view for cost saving, changing his mind, and ultimately leaving people confused.

The BOP has implemented other short-sighted cost-saving measures, including cutting 80 psychology doctoral internships at BOP prisons as part of the DOJ hiring freeze. “If you don’t have people who are incarcerated getting psychological treatment, everything gets worse,” said Golden.

Then, in early May, Trump issued a performative and wildly impractical order for the BOP to reopen Alcatraz, a crumbling, 250-year-old prison that was shut down in 1963 for being too costly and impractical to maintain. The prison complex currently functions as a museum and has no running water, heat, or sanitation.

Trump has also turned his wrath on segments of the incarcerated population. His DOJ ordered the 37 people whose death row sentences were commuted by President Joe Biden in 2024 to be transferred to ADX, a supermax prison with the most extreme solitary confinement in the country. A group of 21 sued, arguing the transfers were unlawful. In late May, a federal judge denied their request for a preliminary injunction blocking the transfer, directing the plaintiffs to appeal their transfers internally first.

Meanwhile, Trump began targeting incarcerated transgender people on his first day in office, when he issued an executive order banning the federal government from funding gender-affirming care, mandating that trans women be housed in men’s prisons, and removing protections for transgender people from Prison Rape Elimination Act guidelines.

People in the BOP were suddenly denied the hormone treatments they rely on. In early June, a federal judge granted a preliminary injunction, temporarily reinstating gender-affirming care, and granting the plaintiffs class-action status. A separate lawsuit has successfully halted the transfer of a group of transgender people into dangerous situations in prisons that align with their sex as assigned at birth, regardless of their transition status, which the government has appealed.

Meanwhile, the administration is unconstitutionally placing Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainees facing civil immigration charges in federal prisons intended for people convicted of federal felonies. Some ICE detainees report being housed in dirty, leaking, and overcrowded cells in BOP prisons, where they suffer unpredictable lockdowns; insufficient and moldy food; and a lack of access to phone calls, medical care, and outside recreation. Some are denied their constitutional right to legal counsel.

In addition to wreaking havoc in the BOP, Trump’s policies indirectly affect people in state prisons and local jails. One of the very few oversight mechanisms to protect the constitutional rights of incarcerated people is the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, which enforces federal civil rights law, in part through its “special litigation” arm.

In recent years, the division has found prisons and jails guilty of violating incarcerated people’s rights against cruel and unusual punishment, their religious freedoms, and their rights under the Americans With Disabilities Act. It has uncovered failures to protect people from physical and sexual abuse; the use of extreme solitary confinement for people with severe mental illness; inadequate medical care; dangerous use of force; and deadly living conditions. It also oversaw the correction of these abuses through consent decrees.

But Trump has completely decimated the Civil Rights Division, placing a radical right-wing culture warrior at the helm, and abruptly transferring longtime staffers to new divisions. All litigation is frozen, including cases where the DOJ was investigating and litigating jurisdictions for incarcerating people in inhumane conditions, and the department is throwing out some preexisting consent decrees.

Fathi noted that few nonprofits do prison civil rights work on a national scale. “The Justice Department covers the entire nation, and they have the resources to take on the most recalcitrant and stubborn state actors,” he explained. “That is going to be a significant loss for the rights of incarcerated people.”

In another loss to incarcerated people’s rights, the DOJ abruptly terminated all funding to the Prison Rape Elimination Act Resource Center in April. PREA is popular on both sides of the aise—it was initially co-sponsored by Jeff Sessions and established by unanimous Congressional vote in 2003. “This administration has sent a clear signal that it is OK with sexual abuse in detention,” said Linda McFarlane, executive director of Just Detention International, in a statement. “And now roughly 2 million people in custody will be in greater danger of sexual abuse.”

Jack Donson, a 23-year former BOP employee, policy expert, and executive director of the Prison Education and Reform Alliance, says the BOP could safely and significantly reduce its spending. He noted the agency has more employees than in the mid-2000s, despite a similar number of incarcerated people. The problem, he argues, is that there are too many bureaucratic roles in D.C. and in regional headquarters, and not enough front-line staff.

“Prison staff will tell you that these administrative layers (especially at the regional level) have become bloated at the expense of correctional and other specialized personnel at individual facilities,” Donson wrote in March. In 2019, USA Today revealed that BOP executives and wardens received $1.6 million in bonuses over the prior two years.

Of course, the DOJ could further ease understaffing by incarcerating fewer people. The 2020 CARES Act released some people nearing the end of their sentences, in an effort to reduce prison overcrowding during the COVID pandemic. Those who took part in the program have a lower-than-average recidivism rate—suggesting a model that could be used to expand early releases.

Yet, that is not the direction Trump’s DOJ is heading. Instead, the administration and the Department of Government Efficiency have cut hundreds of millions of dollars of funding for programs that decrease crime through substance abuse treatment, gun violence prevention, crime victim support, and other initiatives.

When asked about the cuts, the DOJ says the programs “are no longer aligned with the administration’s priorities.” Instead of focusing on dangerous and overcrowded conditions in BOP prisons, the department maintains it is focused on prosecutions, drugs, and “protecting American institutions from toxic DEI and sanctuary city policies.”

In fact, under the current administration, “public safety” appears to be synonymous with “immigrant detention.” As the BOP struggles to retain staff amid hiring freezes and pay cuts, and as budgets for crime reduction and prison rape prevention are slashed, the fiscal year 2026 reconciliation bill supercharges federal immigration enforcement with $171 billion, far dwarfing the BOP budget. It is clear Trump’s concerns do not lie with reducing recidivism or operating safe, structurally sound federal prisons—let alone with protecting the lives and safety of the people incarcerated there.

This article was reported with support from Solitary Watch.