Justice Budget: DOA and LOL?

Andrew Zajac

One set of numbers that leaps off the screen in a quick look at the DOJ section of the 2009 federal budget unveiled on-line this morning is the line item for local police grants.

The Bush Administration proposes massive cuts for these politically popular subsidies, slicing them to just over $800 million from $2.3 billion.

You can debate the merits of the COPS program and other grass-roots policing initiatives all you want, but in a presidential and congressional election year, with violent crime trending back up, a proposed cut of this magnitude, indeed probably any cut at all, won't last long on Capitol Hill.

To get an idea of the likely fate of his reduction, a look at last year's budget is instructive. In that document, the president proposed cutting local grants in half, to $1.23 billion from $2.4 billion. But Congress wound putting back a billion dollars.

Overall, the Administration budget for '09 calls for trimming discretionary spending in the Justice budget by $2.4 billion, with nearly 2/3 of the savings to come from the grant cuts. Not going to happen.

The White House would like to force the Democrat-controlled Congress into a series of votes to restore or increase funding across an array of programs, the better to portray the majority party as profligates for purposes of campaign talking points.

But lawmakers in both parties are fans of money sent to local police departments and this kind of largess typically does not trigger the blowback of some other spending, like earmarks that funded Alaska's famed "Bridge to Nowhere".

For a look at the Administration's entire proposed budget, click here