CRA pushes to increase the FBI’s ability to “thwart” efforts at criminal justice reform

Coinciding roughly with Trump’s political ascendence, conservatives have argued that the FBI has been turned into a secret political force bent on persecuting conservatives, a paradigm CRA’s proposal endorses wholeheartedly. These missives from conservatives sometimes lead to overly credulous mainstream media framing that claims the right aims to rein in the FBI or otherwise curtail the overall power of federal law enforcement. CRA’s budget blows that narrative out of the water.

Rather than wanting to circumscribe the powers of the DOJ and FBI, CRA’s budget makes clear that the conservative goal is to sabotage the least reactionary elements of these agencies, while ramping up funding to offices that can target the right’s political opponents in exactly the way they claim – incorrectly – that law enforcement has been used against them.

Within the DOJ, CRA calls for “significant cuts” to “the highly politicized Civil Rights Division and Environment and Natural Resources Division,” and the ”full elimination of the ‘equity’ obsessed Community Relations Service." It also seeks “to terminate the recently-created Office of Environmental Justice,” which CRA claims is “the beginning of a weaponized effort to target American citizens who refuse to adhere to a destructive green energy agenda.”

As for the FBI, CRA demands “funding reductions within specific subdivisions of the Bureau that are not salvageable due to a willful and repeated pattern of partisan lawfare waged against Americans who do not share the bureaucracy’s increasingly woke and progressive worldview.” This includes “reprioritizing” funding in the Bureau’s Intelligence, Counterintelligence, and Counterterrorism units, as all have been supposedly captured by a “radically woke worldview.” All three of those divisions are at least partially responsible for the FBI’s halting and inadequate attempts to disrupt far-right domestic extremist groups in the United States.

Crucially, there is one office at the FBI that would see its funding get a massive increase: the Criminal Investigative Division. “The Budget calls for $4 billion, an increase of $618 million or 18.3 percent over FY21 levels, to thwart the increasing societal destruction caused by progressive policies at the state and local levels that have defunded police, refused to prosecute criminals, and released violent felons into communities,” CRA writes.

The budget doesn’t specify exactly how the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division would operate in state and local jurisdictions to “thwart” their “progressive policies.” The most reasonable interpretation of this proposal, though, is that Vought and CRA want the FBI to operate like a free-range, federal police force that a Republican president can dispatch to localities deemed as hostile. The FBI’s responses to the uprisings following the death of George Floyd in summer 2020, while Trump was still in office, offer a preview of what that might look like: infiltration, surveillance, and targeting of Black activists.

Beyond the DOJ and FBI, the CRA budget offers other proposed changes to law enforcement, each of which would shift the relative balance of power in these agencies towards their most reactionary components. In the Department of Homeland Security section, CRA calls for additional Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. The budget calls for the elimination of a State Department office tasked with “eliminating corruption” and the redirecting of those funds towards “border enforcement and Coast Guard missions to combat drug trafficking.”

CRA also proposes eliminating “funding for the recent hiring of 87,000 new IRS agents,” who the document claims are “targeting hardworking Americans and struggling families in a craven effort to sustain the broader bureaucracy’s radical progressive agenda.” Vought and CRA here are joining in a chorus of right-wing pundits who have opposed the new hiring of IRS agents under a thin pretext of right-wing populism, but which in reality is simply a reformulation of the longstanding conservative goal to dodge taxes personally and starve public institutions as a matter of policy.

Looming in the background is Vought’s embrace of "Schedule F,” a Trump-era policy designed to remove career federal staffers if they were deemed insufficiently committed to conservative causes. After leaving government, Vought has doubled down on this approach to public service, advising the next Republican president to implement “ideological purity tests” to purge workers with an ”anti-racist" ideology in favor of those with a “Biblical worldview.”

An FBI under the type of administration Vought envisions would likely resemble a Bureau recommitted to the worst excesses and abuses of its past. Although Vought imagines he and his colleagues are subject to that treatment now, his budget shows he's more than willing to actually take this approach against his political opponents.