In announcing a FY 2024 budget proposal that would shrink the Department of Justice’s budget by 3%, the FBI’s by 6% and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ by 7%, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La, revealed last week his party’s intention to render ineffective certain institutions crucial to the rule of law, the Constitution and democracy. You could almost hear former President Donald Trump’s puppet master’s voice speaking through Johnson on March 6 as the speaker proposed budgetary cuts for the agencies Trump and his minions have vilified. This isn’t about fiscal responsibility. It’s about revenge and suppression.
You could almost hear former President Donald Trump’s puppet master’s voice speaking through Johnson.
The Justice Department is overseeing prosecutions of the violent extremists charged with breaching the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, brutally assaulting police officers, threatening threatening to kill then-Vice President Mike Pence and then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and to stop the certification of a valid election. Those prosecutions — and now, convictions — further expose the GOP’s incessant lies about a “rigged” election. Attorney General Merrick Garland, who leads the DOJ, appointed special counsel Jack Smith to oversee DOJ’s prosecutions of Trump in Washington, D.C., and Florida. It’s no wonder, then, that Trump’s henchmen in Congress want to incapacitate the institution they think stands between them and absolute power.
The FBI continues to gather evidence against the Jan. 6 defendants, the thugs Trump refers to as patriots and hostages. The FBI worked the cases that convicted top leaders of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers for seditious conspiracy. The bureau also amassed volumes of evidence that led to the 91 federal charges against Trump.
If you think a 6% chunk of the FBI’s budget isn’t much, think again. It’s a $32 million hit. In a statement, the agency noted that Johnson’s FY 2024 Conference Agreement “does not allow the FBI to sustain current operations necessary to protect the American people.” The statement explains that a cut of that magnitude would reduce the FBI’s ability to counter threats of terrorism to the homeland and keep pace with firearm background checks.
Such cuts would also stall operations combating violent crime, drugs, gangs and transnational organized crime. Cutting the FBI’s budget would also be “a win for China,” as the statement points out, since it would reduce the amount of money available to battle foreign cyber intrusions and conduct “counterintelligence activities.” Budget cuts would also degrade the FBI’s capacity to investigate crimes against children and human trafficking, thereby leaving American kids in harm’s way.
Cuts of the size proposed by Speaker Johnson would inevitably inhibit the FBI lab’s ability to process the overwhelming increase in DNA samples collected by U.S. Customs and Border Protection at the southern U.S border that help identify migrants who may be criminals. The conference agreement “completely eliminates funding to maintain facilities at the FBI Academy and the FBI laboratory.”
Speaker Johnson’s budgetary bloodletting would hit the ATF especially hard. With only 2,600 agents, the ATF is a tiny agency assigned the near-impossible task of trying to enforce existing federal gun safety laws. With such a cut, the GOP would be documenting its total disregard for taking illegal and stolen guns off the streets and making communities safer. And, since the FBI and the ATF both fall under the DOJ, the cuts to those agencies plus the cut to DOJ’s operational budget would amount to a total DOJ slash of 16%. Johnson claimed that cuts to these agencies have to be made because career professionals there “are really overreaching” and “have been turned in some way against the American people.” Johnson claimed that cuts to these agencies have to be made because career professionals there “are really overreaching” and “have been turned in some way against the American people.” Where did they overreach? Was it when they enforced the laws passed by members of Congress who now want enforcement to stop? Which broken laws should these agencies ignore? Which investigations should they not pursue? I think we know the answer. Johnson and other Republican officials want the DOJ and the FBI to stop investigating Trump and the criminal element among his cult followers. They want those agencies to halt any inquiries that might reveal Congress members’ culpability in unlawful attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Don’t ever let another Republican Congress member tell you they “back the blue” or support the rule of law. They’re the ones defunding the police now, and they’re the ones who have “overreached” and been “turned against the American people” by striving to make our streets less safe from violent criminals. They’re also the politicians working to make the Capitol’s corridors less safe and less secure because they’re more concerned with protecting their candidate from criminal prosecution than protecting us from violent crime and corruption. 
