Jackie Calmes reports for the NYT, "President Obama will call for a three-year freeze in spending on many domestic programs...." The freeze "would exempt security-related budgets for the Pentagon, foreign aid, the Veterans Administration and homeland security, as well as the entitlement programs that make up the biggest and fastest-growing part of the federal budget: Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security." Undocumented anchorman Mark Steyn, sitting in for El Rushbo, draws an analogy between a budget being a little bit frozen and a woman being a little bit pregnant. Doug Berman asks how this will affect federal law enforcement. Good question.
Certainly a big chunk of the law enforcement budget is "security related" and therefore exempt from the freeze by its terms. Figuring out exactly what part is going to be complex.
What about the rest of it? Well here are two classes of criminal cases that can easily be cut out of the federal law enforcement budget: (1) crimes that shouldn't be federal; and (2) acts that shouldn't be criminal at all.
Making a federal crime out of a garden variety bank robbery, merely because the bank is FDIC insured, may be constitutional, but it is still bad policy. The law that made nearly all arsons federal offenses was trimmed back by the Supreme Court in Jones v. United States, 529 U.S. 848 (2000) to save it from unconstitutionality, but it can be cut back further as a matter of policy.
Then there is the problem of using criminal law for matters that should be the domain of administrative or tort law, as explained in this Heritage Foundation memo by Paul Rosenzweig.
When money is tight (or even when it isn't), each government agency should focus on its core mission and stop doing things that should be done by a lower level of government or shouldn't be done by government at all. If the agency's core mission fits the latter description, the entire agency should be eliminated. The core functions of each level of government should not be sacrificed.
Certainly a big chunk of the law enforcement budget is "security related" and therefore exempt from the freeze by its terms. Figuring out exactly what part is going to be complex.
What about the rest of it? Well here are two classes of criminal cases that can easily be cut out of the federal law enforcement budget: (1) crimes that shouldn't be federal; and (2) acts that shouldn't be criminal at all.
Making a federal crime out of a garden variety bank robbery, merely because the bank is FDIC insured, may be constitutional, but it is still bad policy. The law that made nearly all arsons federal offenses was trimmed back by the Supreme Court in Jones v. United States, 529 U.S. 848 (2000) to save it from unconstitutionality, but it can be cut back further as a matter of policy.
Then there is the problem of using criminal law for matters that should be the domain of administrative or tort law, as explained in this Heritage Foundation memo by Paul Rosenzweig.
When money is tight (or even when it isn't), each government agency should focus on its core mission and stop doing things that should be done by a lower level of government or shouldn't be done by government at all. If the agency's core mission fits the latter description, the entire agency should be eliminated. The core functions of each level of government should not be sacrificed.
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