Attorney General Merrick Garland appears at a House hearing at the Capitol on June 4, 2024. (Joe Gromelski/Special to Stars and Stripes)
Attorney General Merrick Garland on Tuesday decried a proposal from House Republicans to slash the Justice Department’s budget by nearly $1 billion for next year, saying such cuts would risk undermining progress in reducing violent crime nationwide.
“This effort … is unacceptable,” Garland said at a news conference in Cleveland, where he traveled to mark the opening of a new intelligence center to help state and federal prosecutors combat gun violence.
Garland’s remarks came hours after the House GOP unveiled a fiscal 2025 budget proposal that would set Justice’s funding at $36.5 billion, about $3 billion less than the amount President Biden is seeking. Some conservatives have targeted the Justice Department for cuts as part of their opposition to the criminal prosecutions of former president Donald Trump.
Trump was convicted last month on 34 felony New York state counts of falsifying business records. He faces state charges in Georgia for election interference and federal charges in Washington for election interference and in Florida for illegally retaining classified documents. Garland has appointed Jack Smith as special counsel to oversee the federal cases.
Trump has pleaded not guilty in all of his indictments. He and his Republican allies have sought to paint the prosecutions as politically motivated, accusing the Justice Department and Democrats of targeting the former president. Trump is the presumptive Republican presidential nominee to face Biden in the November election.
House Republicans voted this month to hold Garland in contempt over his refusal to turn over audiotapes of special counsel Robert K. Hur’s interview with Biden during an investigation last year into the president’s handling of classified documents. Biden exerted executive privilege to shield the tapes after Garland said their public disclosure could hamper the Justice Department’s ability to conduct future investigations.
Garland has lashed out at what he says are baseless attacks and conspiracies from Republicans that have threatened to undermine the rule of law. “I will not be intimidated,” he said this month.
A House Appropriations subcommittee is scheduled to hold a markup hearing on the GOP’s budget proposal Wednesday.
“This bill prioritizes fiscal sanity and the liberties of the American people,” Committee Chairman Tom Cole (R-Okla.) said in a statement. “It halts the weaponization of the federal government against its citizens and enhances congressional oversight to ensure taxpayer dollars are used responsibly.”
In Cleveland, Garland and Steve Dettelbach, director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, hailed progress in combating violent crime, which fell nationwide by 6 percent in 2023, according to FBI data. Murders, which had spiked in many cities during and after the coronavirus pandemic, dropped 13 percent last year, one of the steepest annual declines, officials said.
Dettelbach cited a $50 million cut to ATF’s budget last year and said the new House GOP proposal would “impose even deeper cuts.”
Such budget reductions would mean “an inability to open other centers like this,” Dettelbach said of the intelligence center, which aims to use technology and federal tracking systems to pursue investigations into gun crimes in the Northeast Ohio region.
“It will threaten the closing of facilities like this,” he said, “and mean leaving our communities less protected and, thus, less safe.”
