A bipartisan spending package rolled out Monday would turn down several key Trump administration budget proposals aimed at restructuring components inside the Justice Department and orders reports on a new way the DOJ is coordinating some major probes.
The bill would decline a past Justice Department proposal to eliminate the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and merge its functions into the Drug Enforcement Administration, an idea the department has appeared to back off on.
Groups on both sides of the gun debate found rare agreement in opposing the plan, though for different reasons. The bill would fund the ATF and DEA separately.
A Senate Democratic summary of the bill said the Trump administration proposal would have substantially reduced resources for both, “gutting the main federal law enforcement agencies charged with enforcing our nation’s gun and drug laws and keeping people safe.”
The legislative text also would not endorse a Justice Department proposal to consolidate the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services and the Office on Violence Against Women into the Office of Justice Programs. In the bill, those entities would be funded as their own separate line items.
A report that accompanied Monday’s bill stated “the agreement directs the Department to maintain the Office on Violence Against Women and Office of Community Oriented Policing Services as distinct organizational grantmaking entities within the Department.” Such reports are often seen as guidance for agencies on congressional intent.
Last year, the Trump administration had asked Congress to delete a portion of a federal law that requires the Office on Violence Against Women to be a separate office within the Justice Department, a move experts said would hamstring the office’s visibility and saddle victim grant programs with more bureaucracy.
The bill also includes $20 million in funding for the Justice Department’s Community Relations Service, an entity known as “America’s Peacemaker” that helps communities through facilitated dialogue and mediation.
That line item funding is likely to complicate the Justice Department’s push to shutter the entity, an effort that’s being challenged in court.
Reports ordered
The spending package appeared to go along with the DOJ’s moves to disband a decades-old program tasked with coordinating major drug-trafficking and transnational-crime investigations.
Unlike past appropriations bills, the new legislative text does not specify line item funding for the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces, which had helped coordinate a range of investigations over the years, including efforts to take down Colombian cartels in the 1980s and violent Mexican cartels in the 1990s.
The Trump administration disbanded the program last year, despite an appropriations law (PL 119-37) that directed money toward the program and despite signs that GOP appropriators supported the program’s line item funding.
The report that accompanied Monday’s bill says the agreement would provide $300 million “to continue the inter-governmental drug interdiction work of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces.”
“Because the Department is instead participating in a new task force co-led by the Department of Homeland Security, the agreement directs DOJ to provide both a written report and in-person briefing quarterly to the Committees,” the report language states.
The language states that the reports and briefings should detail “how funds under the Interagency Crime and Drug Enforcement sub-heading have been used to investigate and reduce: the availability of illegal drugs; violence, corruption and other criminal activity associated with the drug trade.”
A Senate Democratic summary said the bill “rebuffs President Trump’s efforts to dismantle DOJ’s Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces (OCDETF) by restricting funding provided for OCDETF to activities directly related to fighting major drug trafficking organizations and transnational organized crime—not to support immigration raids.”
The bill is part of a combo package with two other fiscal 2026 spending measures. The “C-J-S” portion of the draft text would fund the Justice and Commerce departments, NASA and the National Science Foundation, among other agencies.
If the package makes it through both chambers and is signed by the president, Congress will have finished half of the dozen annual appropriations bills, after an initial three were enacted as part of the stopgap law that reopened the government in November. Congressional leaders are racing to complete fiscal 2026 appropriations before the Jan. 30 deadline when current stopgap funding expires.
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