It’s been two weeks since President Donald Trump took the oath of office for a second time. His inauguration thrust out the Biden administration, which had treated gun reform as a top priority, and replaced it with a White House that has vowed to undo its predecessor’s gun policies.

Since then, federal funding for gun violence research and prevention has been thrown into chaos, a side effect of the Trump administration’s dramatic back-and-forth on spending writ large.

Whether the muddle will have lasting effects remains to be seen. But the end of the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention was one of the first and clearest effects of Trump’s return. The office no longer exists. Yet its former directors are optimistic that the changes they made can withstand Trump.

In the last Trajectory, I shared my interview with Greg Jackson, the first of two Q&As with the office’s co-directors. My conversation with Rob Wilcox, the second part, is below. Our interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Q: What would you consider to be the most significant accomplishment of the Office of Gun Violence Prevention?

A: Our legacy with this office, and this administration, is naming gun violence what it is — a public health crisis — and then implementing an all-of-government approach. We no longer have to wonder: What does it look like to have gun safety be a top priority across government? What we have is an example of what we can do with the tools that are available.

Within our first week on the job, there was a cabinet meeting where the president and vice president challenged each agency to do more. We worked with each agency to develop a suite of actions. Some of them are about economic opportunity and the development of recreation. Some of it is an investment in community violence intervention and suicide intervention through the 988 crisis centers. Other pieces have to do with stopping access to guns for those who are in crisis or those who might commit harm. Really focusing on how we get upstream to the gun traffickers, to the illegal importers of machine gun conversion devices, to gun sales without background checks. 

Taking into account the fact that you know the office itself may be gone, what do you think will be the most lasting impact on communities and neighborhoods?

It isn’t in a single piece of policy. It’s the historic decrease in gun violence that we’ve seen across this country. The legacy isn’t just policy; it’s results. It is not results that tell us our job is over, but it tells us our solutions work. The pride that this office has isn’t just that we see dots on a graph, but what we know is those dots represent lives and families, and they represent birthdays and weddings instead of funerals and visits to cemeteries. 

I think one other important legacy for this office is showing what it looks like to maximize the implementation of the laws that we pass. I’m talking about the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, the first significant gun safety legislation to pass in 30 years, over the opposition of the National Rifle Association and with the support of 15 Republican senators. It had a significant change in how guns should be sold in this country, but it also had $15 billion in resources, the largest investment in school-based youth mental health, $250 million for community violence intervention. And that is part of the legacy. It shows what we can do when we try to maximize the benefits of the laws we pass. And that’s something that we need to be doing across the country.

Outside of the office itself and outside of the White House, did you all notice any cultural shifts in how career civil servants — the people who work day to day and the agencies outside of the White House — approach this issue? And do you think that will last beyond the Biden administration? 

We saw that we need interagency processes to deal with the complex issue of gun violence. No single agency can do it on its own, because each agency has a stake in the solutions. 

Once we started setting up these interagency processes, what we saw was two things: One is, there are survivors of gun violence across government. Those experiences and those people will be there. The second is, when you get folks around the table, you can give them the freedom to develop solutions that complement each other versus existing in silos. What is true is that solutions spread across agencies and we created those spaces, and I’m hopeful that those folks keep working together. And, at the very least, what we have is a template that we can bring to our state and local partners to implement.

I think we should kind of grapple with the fact that a lot of people in the gun violence prevention movement are probably worried about the next four years. Do you worry that the work that you did is at risk now? And what would you say to people who are concerned about that?

For a long time, there was a debate about, do we pass new laws, or do we enforce the laws on the books? And we enforced the laws on the books. This administration maximized the tools that were available, and it’s yet to be seen what will happen next. Project 2025 doesn’t detail an agenda around gun violence prevention. I think the work that we’ve done has been and should be seen as bipartisan, nonpartisan even, because it was about the resources and policies that Congress put in place.

This movement is broader and deeper than I had ever really known. And I think the work that we had been doing wasn’t just from our office, but it was in partnership with law enforcement, community violence intervention organizations, health systems, schools, and more. 

That’s another reason why I think it’ll be hard to roll back, because the changes that we made, the investments, the policy, were really incredibly popular. We all have to be vigilant, though, because we know what we’ve done in the past year and change, and we’ve seen the results. And so we should be vigilant to what’s rolled back. 

Is there a possibility for progress on the policy front or the law front in the next four years?

I’m optimistic that there’s room for bipartisan compromise because I lived through it with the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act. We didn’t pass that law because we had more Democrats in the U.S. Senate. We saw a good-faith negotiation. We saw Republicans come to the table with ideas around mental health and school safety and compromise on gun violence prevention. And there’s no reason we can’t find those opportunities down the line, be they on safe storage or emerging firearms threats, investment in crime gun intelligence centers and community violence intervention, supporting survivors through the Victims of Crime Act. At the end of the day, when you look at how this issue affects Americans, gun violence does not pick a side in the political debate. It affects us all.

I don’t want my answer to seem too pollyannaish, though. We are not going to make the level of progress in the next four years that we’ve made in the prior.

How can state and local governments pick up on that and move forward?

I think a lot of people’s concern is putting themselves back in 2016, and the truth is, the present couldn’t be more different. We’ve gone from one statewide office of gun violence prevention to 14. We’ve gone from about 20 local offices to over 100. We have more gun safety laws on the books, we have more funding and resources available for intervention and survivors to the tune of billions of dollars. And so we really are not at the end of this movement. We’re at the end of the beginning, a beginning where we finally have seen what the full power of government can do when it tries to address this as a public health crisis. 

We really are not at the end of this movement. We’re at the end of the beginning, a beginning where we finally have seen what the full power of government can do when it tries to address this as a public health crisis.

And that’s not limited to the federal government. It’s something we can do in our states, in our cities. We can build on the partnerships with health systems, law enforcement, and communities to not just intervene, but to go upstream and reduce access to firearms for those who are in crisis, get out those who are trafficking or unlicensed sellers who aren’t even from a community but have been profiting from sales without background checks for years. 

So what’s exciting to me at this moment is we have leaders across the country dedicated to keeping their citizens safe, and what we have now is not a hypothetical proposal. We have a real playbook that’s been run at the highest level of government, where we cut through bureaucracy and red tape to actually see transformational change.

Do you think there will be another White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention in the future? Should there be?

When I got started in this movement in 2001, I imagined and believed that we could pass a law at the federal level. I imagined that we could stand up in hearing rooms and testify about the strength of our solutions. But I never thought we would have an office dedicated to this issue. And it wasn’t until it actually happened that the idea became real. And there’s now no going back, because forever, whoever is in the presidency will have to be asked: Are you going to have an office on gun violence prevention? What are you going to do to address this public health crisis with an all-of-government approach? I am 100 percent confident we will see another office of gun violence prevention because it’s without a doubt the right thing to do, it was the effective thing to do, and there’s still so much more left to do. 

Next time, do it on Day One. Do it bigger. Do it better, right? This isn’t the final form of what an office can be. This is just version one. And version two is yet to come.