It took a long while, but congressional negotiators have had considerable success in recent weeks reaching compromises on federal spending. It’s why the House was able to pass six appropriations bills yesterday afternoon — with relative ease — that will fund much of the government through the end of September.

But ahead of the vote, House Speaker Mike Johnson felt the need to convince as many of his fellow Republicans as possible to support the deal he helped negotiate. To sell the spending package, the Louisianan boasted at a Capitol Hill press conference about the specific cuts he and the GOP were able to secure:

“We also advanced, as you’ve seen the summary, cuts to some of the agencies that we believe are really overreaching and have been turned, in some ways, against the American people,” Johnson said. “We’re going to cut 3% from [the Department of Justice], 7% from the [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms], 6% from the FBI, and 10% from the EPA. And that’s just a start.”

The same afternoon, the House speaker also spoke to Fox News about the spending package, bragging, “We did get conservative policy wins here. We got cuts to the agencies, some of them that are the worst offenders in going after the people they’re supposed to protect and serve. There’s a lot to champion here.”

Right off the bat, it’s worth noting that the cuts the GOP leader is so proud of aren’t quite what they appear to be. Punchbowl News had a good report on this, noting, “[S]ome of the cuts Johnson is claiming aren’t quite as dramatic as they appear to be at first glance. They’re cuts, just not huge cuts.”

If the cuts were really that dramatic, Democrats likely would’ve balked and there wouldn’t have been a deal.

It’s also important to emphasize that Johnson’s entire pitch is based on weird conspiracy theories. The idea that the Justice Department, the FBI, and the ATF have been “turned against” the American people is absurd, and stems from baseless far-right smear campaigns with no basis in reality.

Myth-based policymaking is inherently misguided.

But let’s also not miss the forest for the trees: In 2024, the far-right Republican House speaker, looking for “conservative policy wins,” focused much of his attention on one priority: cutting funding for law enforcement.

This isn’t altogether new, given that GOP lawmakers have spent the last 14 months desperately trying to strip funding for the Internal Revenue Service, which is a part of federal law enforcement, but Johnson’s efforts and comments this week were a timely reminder that Republicans are equally eager to target funds for the Justice Department, the FBI, and the ATF.

The speaker didn’t grudgingly point to these cuts as necessary budgetary moves in an era of belt-tightening; rather he touted these cuts as justified political punishments for agencies that Republicans are mad at.

Or put another way, the party that grew hysterical in response to “defund the police” rhetoric is now trying to score political points by rolling back funds for law enforcement.