The Republican Party has long sought to leverage a wayward political slogan offered by a handful of Democrats and Black Lives Matter activists: Defund the police.
The GOP’s first act upon regaining the House of Representatives? Voting to defund those who enforce the law.
That’s a bit oversimplified, sure: The first bill the House GOP passed Monday specifically targets the IRS — effectively the tax police. Many prominent Republicans have hyperbolically suggested the agency is stepping up enforcement against the middle class, falsely claiming it plans to hire an “army” of 87,000 new agents.
Still, it’s telling that this was their first order of business and that it came as Republicans are continuing to flirt with defunding other agencies, including ones that enforce the law and protect the public — in ways that could play into Democratic messaging.
Hard-right House Republicans recently gained a concession as part of negotiations over Kevin McCarthy’s quest to become speaker: The House would vote on a 10-year budget that would freeze spending at 2022 levels. That could lead to a 10 percent cut in defense funding.
And while some Republicans have assured (probably correctly) that this will never be enacted because hawkish House Republicans and the Democratic-controlled Senate wouldn’t sign off, others have persisted in suggesting that defense funding is not off-limits.
“You got to look at everything and you do it in a way that doesn’t hurt our troops,” Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) said, adding: “But we do have to look at general officer ratio to enlisted individuals. And we do have to look at all the woke nonsense that we see now in our military and the money that goes for things like that. So those have to be on the table.”
It’s not the first time lawmakers and prominent conservatives have toyed with the idea. Last summer, Fox News host Laura Ingraham and Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) floated withholding defense funding entirely to weed out so-called “woke” policies.
The White House responded this week by criticizing what it called a “push to defund our military in the name of politics.”
Similarly, one of the chief hard-right negotiators of the speakership deal, Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.), on Monday spotlit another large federal agency that he argued should be in line for cuts: the Department of Homeland Security. This agency had been in a similar spotlight last summer, specifically concerning its planned (and unfortunately named) Disinformation Governance Board.
But Roy’s line of reasoning appears to be pretty new for a GOP lawmaker: “So it’s time right now for the House majority to do our job, and we’re going to have to stop funding a Department of Homeland Security that refuses to secure the border of the United States.”
Beyond the vote to defund the IRS and the calls to cut defense and DHS spending, some prominent conservatives and hard-right House GOP lawmakers promoted defunding the FBI last summer, after the search of former president Donald Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) even printed T-shirts with the slogan.
As with Democrats and “defund the police,” some of the party’s wiser minds quickly suggested that maybe adopting this position was a very bad idea, and it soon faded into the background. (Though less drastic measures — like investigating the FBI, or standing up a select committee on the Mar-a-Lago search — could still be on the table.)
In each of these cases, supporters of funding cuts would certainly argue that such actions wouldn’t aim to hamstring those who uphold the law and protect the public, so much as punish an agency that is failing at a core mission — or even, in the most strained arguments, has been “weaponized.” But that nuance was out the window when the right was pushing back against what existed of the “defund the police” movement and saying that it showed that Democrats were soft on crime.
Now Republicans are newly empowered to try to force spending cuts — and with fresh eagerness to do so under a Democratic administration. And the party will apparently have to contend with a small but potentially powerful faction that’s unconcerned about how these issues might play for middle-of-the-road voters.
They’ll also have some key tools to enact these ideas. The new House rules reinstated the Holman Rule, which allows lawmakers to vote to cut specific federal agency programs and the salaries of individual federal employees. And another key concession required any increase in the debt ceiling to be accompanied by spending cuts.
That doesn’t mean cuts to any of these agencies will actually become law; there’s plenty working against that. But certain lawmakers anxious to target a given agency could force some uncomfortable conversations, thanks to McCarthy’s concessions and the narrow GOP majority putting the House Freedom Caucus in the driver’s seat.
And the fact that the GOP saw fit to launch its new House majority by voting to defund a federal agency based on hyperbolic claims seems to say plenty about where things could go from here.