Congressional leaders revealed this week they plan to narrowly decrease the FBI’s annual funding as part of a newly released government spending bill, and the House and Senate are expected to vote on the legislation before Friday evening to prevent a partial government shutdown.
When the bill was made public, Republicans touted that the FBI was among a handful of agencies that would see a minimal decrease in funding through fiscal 2024. The bureau’s 6% funding decrease came out to $654 million and results in the FBI’s budget coming in at $10.7 billion.
The legislation “utilizes the power of the purse to address the weaponization of the growing bureaucracy within the FBI,” Republicans said.
The GOP has long been critical of the FBI, accusing the bureau of targeting people with conservative viewpoints. House Republican lawmakers have called for slashing its funding and have threatened to deny the bureau the funds for a new, multibillion-dollar headquarters in Maryland.
Republicans have majority control over only the House, and only by a two-vote margin. This appropriations bill, known as “minibus” legislation comprising six of 12 appropriations bills, is therefore the result of a compromise between Republican and Democrat leaders. Its overall spending cuts are not anywhere near what hard-right members of the GOP have demanded, but the bill can still pass this week as long as it receives a vote from two-thirds of the lower chamber. It would fund the Department of Justice, FBI, and several other agencies through Sept. 30 of this year.
The decrease in the FBI’s funding, in particular, can almost entirely be attributed to excising a budget item former Sen. Richard Shelby, then the top Republican on the Senate Appropriations Committee, included in fiscal 2023’s appropriations bill for his home state. He touted as one of his final acts of Congress that he secured $652 million for construction at an already-existing FBI facility in Alabama.
Of the total $654 million cut included in this year’s appropriations bill, $622 million of it falls under the FBI’s construction budget. The budget leaves $30 million for construction, which accounts for projects that are unrelated to the FBI’s headquarters.
The budget for the General Services Administration, whose funding Congress will approve in the coming weeks, would capture capital funding for the headquarters. The GSA allocated $3.5 billion for this in its fiscal 2024 budget request to Congress.
The timing of construction on the new headquarters is unclear, however. GSA’s inspector general is in the process of investigating the site selection process after more than a decade of debate led to a surprise choice of Greenbelt, Maryland, over Springfield, Virginia. An FBI official tasked with overseeing the bureau’s facilities told Congress in recent testimony that the current headquarters, situated in the 1970s-era J. Edgar Hoover building in Washington, D.C., is visibly deteriorating and that the need for a new site is increasingly necessary.
While the FBI’s relocation plans keep the bureau headquartered in the greater area of Washington, the FBI’s fiscal 2024 funding specifies that the bureau must complete a study that examines “expanding” the FBI’s work to its regional locations. House Republicans indicated in their summary of the legislation that they view this as a way of encouraging the bureau to “decentralize its presence in D.C.”
While the overall budget cut is slight, and reflective of cuts to some other agencies, the FBI is dissatisfied with it. The bureau had warned House leaders in a letter at the end of last year that any cuts to the FBI’s spending abilities would ultimately “make America less safe.”
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In a statement on Monday, the bureau said the fiscal 2024 plan “does not allow the FBI to sustain current operations needed to protect the American people.”
“Budget cuts will reduce the FBI’s ability to counter threats of terrorism to the homeland; keep pace with firearm background checks; and operations combatting violent crime, drugs, gangs, and transnational organized crime,” the bureau said, adding that the cut is also a “win for China” because it would reduce counterintelligence activity.
