The Federal Bureau of Investigation has requested a budget of $9.05 billion for fiscal year 2017, a 6 percent increase. Maryland Sen. Barbara Mikulski and Florida Sen. Bill Nelson, both Democrats, are leading an effort to add $190 million to that budget to deal with domestic terrorism. Seung Min Kim and Matthew Nussbaum report:
Democrats say their “pro-security” funding proposal would “ensure that the FBI has the emergency funding they need to track and stop domestic terrorists plotting to kill Americans” as well as bolster resources for more active shooter training for FBI officials. [...]
The Democrats' plan would add $190 million overall to the spending bill for the Justice Department, which also provides funding for the Commerce Department and science-related agencies. About $175 million will be directed toward the FBI’s counterterrorism efforts and $15 million for active shooter training.
The idea behind the proposal is to “ensure that the FBI has the emergency funding they need to track and stop domestic terrorists plotting to kill Americans,” according to the Democrats.
But one obstacle, as is always the case these days, arises from the continuing budget sequestration that puts a cap on broad categories of federal spending. If more money is appropriated for the bureau’s budget, the funds would have to be offset with less spending elsewhere.
But some possibility of productive bipartisanship exists in the matter—without offsets.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican, says he’d like to see sequestration on FBI funding lifted altogether. And if there were a package deal that included lifting the budget cap, Graham said, he might be persuaded to support a much-disputed proposal that would bar anyone on the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center’s watch list from purchasing a firearm legally. Previous efforts to pass such a bill have failed because of strong lobbying by the National Rifle Association and other gun advocacy groups. They and some civil libertarians have argued that the method of adding names to the watch list means many people with no connection to terrorists are on it and have no effective means of appealing their placement there.
Begun after the 9/11 attacks in 2001, the watch list includes people known or suspected to be involved in terrorist activities. As of two years ago, that list had 800,000 names on it, mostly not Americans, according to congressional testimony in September 2014 from a Terrorist Screening Center official. A smaller subset, the no-fly list, has about 64,000 people on it.
For 10 months during 2013-2014, Omar Mateen—the Orlando gunman who last weekend killed or injured more than 100 people with firearms he had bought only days before—was on the terrorist watch list. But after the FBI interviewed him, he was taken off the list. Even if he had still been on it, he would not have been prohibited from buying the two firearms he used in the massacre he carried out.