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By Nick Reynolds
Senior Reporter, Politics
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Since President Joe Biden took office, "defund the FBI" has become a rallying cry for conservative activists and politicians who believe the current administration has weaponized the nation's highest law enforcement authority against them.
Once merely a talking point, the calls for drastic change in the bureau have evolved into tangible policy proposals, with recent conversations on the campaign trail and in Congress starting to offer indications that such a policy might become a cornerstone issue in the 2024 elections.
Senator Tim Scott and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis have pledged to replace current Director Christopher Wray if elected president, while DeSantis has criticized former President Donald Trump's judgment in appointing him to the post.
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Trump, who has a history of threatening to fire officials investigating him, has encouraged Congress to defund the FBI and the Department of Justice amid indictments against him, claiming that both organizations demonstrated an uneven application of justice toward him and Biden's son, Hunter.
Congressional Republicans have begun weighing the possible impeachment of Wray, while in hearing rooms on Capitol Hill, there has been open talk of cutting agency budgets that would previously have been unthinkable.
"Unless I'm missing something glaring, there were very few open calls since the 1930s to cut the FBI's budget," Douglas Charles, a professor at Penn State University-Greater Allegheny and a leading expert on the history of the FBI, told Newsweek.
With a Democrat in the White House—not to mention liberal majorities in the Senate and still-skeptical moderates in the Republican conference—such plans are unlikely to succeed in the current Congress.
But at least one GOP presidential hopeful, Vivek Ramaswamy, has already outlined extensive reforms to the FBI's budget and structure if elected, pledging to dismantle the bureau, with prospective staffing cuts as significant as 56 percent of the agency's current workforce.
"We won't just reform—reform is a false promise," he said during a recent campaign event. "I don't think the people who make that promise believe it's false[...]but I believe it is a false promise because it cannot be done."
Historically, most efforts to cut the bureau's budget have not just failed, they've failed miserably, Charles said. During J. Edgar Hoover's so-called war on the gangsters of the Prohibition Era, conservative Democratic Senator Kenneth McKellar accused the bureau of running wild with its budget before proposing a 25 percent reduction after Hoover's request for a budget increase in 1937. Hoover ultimately convinced Congress to replace the money.
There was also progressive Republican Senator George Norris, who condemned the FBI for alleged violations of civil liberties in the pre-World War II era, while, after Hoover's death in 1972, revelations of FBI abuses led to some Democrats behind the scenes talking about budget cuts to reign in the bureau. While some efforts at reforms, including limits on wiretaps, were successful, discussions of budget cuts were never made public, much less successful, Charles said.
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The recent rhetoric toward the bureau, however, is unprecedented, and less a product of political necessity than of grievance.
"What's going on today is, in fact, new," Charles said. "Historically, as a law enforcement body, the FBI has always been a fundamentally conservative organization. Its main boosters have always been conservatives and notably the GOP. The fact that this dynamic seems to have flipped is just bizarre, and reflective of clownish politics, really. It would be another thing if there were genuine FBI scandals afoot, but I see none of any consequence."
To some degree, FBI budgets—like other areas of the federal budget—have seen stark increases. After the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, real FBI spending nearly doubled from $5.25 billion 2000 to $10.44 billion by the following decade, eventually reaching its current level of $11.4 billion in 2023.
While current GOP proposals in Congress seek to return the agency's budget to $10.3 billion ahead of the September 2023 budget deadline, Wray has claimed in testimony before House appropriators that such a reduction could be detrimental to the bureau's work thwarting emerging domestic, as well as international threats from countries like China and drug cartels that have become common in GOP criticism of the Biden administration's border policies.
"We would have hundreds more violent criminals out on the street," Wray said during a July hearing on his agency's budget. "Dozens more violent gangs terrorizing communities, hundreds more child predators on the loose, hundreds more kids left at those predators' mercy instead of being rescued, scores of threats from the Chinese Communist Party being left unaddressed, hundreds of ransomware attacks left unmitigated, and terrorist attacks, both jihadist-inspired and domestic violent extremists, not prevented that would succeed against Americans."
Former FBI officials, meanwhile, believe the revival of such lofty aspirations to slash budgets are not just unrealistic, they're irresponsible.
"This whole proposal is total nonsense," Michael Clark, a lecturer at the University of New Haven and a former FBI special agent, told Newsweek. "I know Mr. Ramaswamy is a very bright individual, but he is either misinformed on the day-to-day activities of the FBI or he is just pandering for votes. I am fully aware the FBI has been on the front pages of recent news stories for all of the wrong reasons, but this is the result of a small number of employees who have done stupid things. I am sure in Mr. Ramaswamy's business entities there are some employees that do stupid things as well, so should we shut his business down entirely?
"Day to day, the FBI does incredible work. The agents and support staff are incredibly dedicated and willing to put their lives on the line each and every day. Anyone who wishes to adopt this plan simply does not understand the role the FBI plays in working with local and state law enforcement as the leader in numerous task forces; in working with foreign partners in both law enforcement and counterintelligence roles; and working to combat the most dangerous characters to include gangs, cartels and terrorists."
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