The Department of Justice’s proposed budget for the next fiscal year was assailed on Thursday by Sen. Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, as “full of budgetary gimmicks and sleight of hand.”
Chuck Grassley (Getty Images)
Instead of being a streamlined spending plan, as Deputy Attorney General James Cole described it, the $27.1 billion package would “essentially allow the Justice Department to increase the size of the bureaucracy, without looking like they’re spending more money,” Grassley asserted.
Grassley cited several examples in which he said actual DOJ spending increases are masked as savings by factoring in unspent money in various accounts. “These one-time recessions are more than just deceiving, they are actually harmful to the long-term viability of the federal government’s budget,” Grassley said.
Grassley, a long-time farmer, is also a senior member of the Senate Budget Committee, a post from which he said he tries to apply “personal frugality to the public purse.” He said he takes consolation that, so far, Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic majority leader, has signaled that he does not plan to bring “such a dead-on-arrival budget to the Senate floor.”
Whether President Barack Obama’s $3.8 trillion proposed budget is really “dead on arrival” remains to be seen. But with the House controlled by Republicans and Democrats only narrowly in control of the Senate, the budget for the DOJ, like other spending plans in the vast federal bureaucracy, is sure to be hotly debated before final passage.
