Pennsylvania’s budget means life or death in homes across the state

Domestic violence services are cut during the impasse

Rep. Mary Jo Daley    November 3, 2025 | 10:56 AM

Pennsylvania’s budget impasse is only the newest matter of life or death facing the thousands of people confronted with domestic violence across our commonwealth.

The state budget, even during an impasse, helps fund what we typically associate with public safety – police and emergency services on the street – but the just-as-important groups that lose all their funding during an impasse are our rape crisis and domestic violence support centers across Pennsylvania.

Administered in all 67 counties, Pennsylvania’s nonprofit coalitions that support abuse survivors with intervention, counseling, rehousing, legal services and medical advocacy save countless lives. They help victims become survivors and are vital to the administration of our good public health.

In Pennsylvania, one person dies every three days in an act of domestic violence. Domestic violence homicides disproportionately affect women, with firearms being the most common method of killing.

Knowing all this firsthand while watching lifesaving services be cut off during the impasse literally keeps Pennsylvania Coalition Against Domestic Violence CEO Susan Higginbotham up at night. She told me so while pleading with legislators in their Harrisburg offices – in October – to end the 2025-26 state budget impasse so that PCADV and groups like it can continue providing crisis support for people in harm’s way.

Domestic violence programs are struggling to borrow funds to keep operations afloat, and many have furloughed or laid off counselors, advocates and other essential personnel, she said.

“The budget impasse has created the potential for lethal outcomes,” Susan told my office.

Each day without state funding means approximately 247 additional domestic violence victims and their children do not receive the lifesaving supports they need, the PCADV materials illustrate.

Meanwhile, there is violence inside bedrooms, kitchens and living rooms in homes in every neighborhood, at all times of the day, week, month and year.

When appropriately funded, PCADV and its network of 59 local domestic violence programs provide free and confidential direct services to nearly 90,000 victims and survivors of domestic violence and their children each year.

The Pennsylvania Coalition to Advance Respect, formerly the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Rape, reports that Pennsylvania’s network of rape-crisis centers supports more than 27,000 people impacted by sexual violence annually – about one-third of them children.

For survivors under the care of these groups, the impasse has imploded their critical life-affirming support. Essential services for victims may be delayed, causing each day to be deadlier than the last. Pennsylvanians escaping violence cannot wait.

As heartbreaking as they are, we cannot simply care these problems away. Victim services for domestic violence and rape crisis have real price tags for heroic work, and just like for everyone else on the planet, the price of doing business goes up for these organizations each year, as well. The three House budgets I voted for recognized that reality and properly invested in PCADV and the other organizations like it.

As we like to say, a budget reflects the moral priorities your government should stand for.

To Pennsylvania’s Senate holdouts: the impasse is literally leaving people on the line to die. You can talk to Susan Higginbotham more about it, or you could look for yourself at PCADV.org.

Let’s get a budget done before more lives are lost. What could possibly provide more motivation?