During a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) slammed Trump DOJ grant cuts and promoted an amendment to restore them.
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00:00Thank you kindly. Look, as we race to spend more than $81 billion in this bill, primarily for ICE and deportation,
00:11the Department of Justice just terminated hundreds of millions of dollars in grants to groups working in all of our communities,
00:23cutting funds for state, local, and county law enforcement, cutting funds for opioid addiction treatment programs,
00:31cutting funds for crime prevention programs, cutting funds to support victims of rape and sexual assault.
00:40And this move is baffling. These are grants that support our local police in solving violent crime.
00:48They help survivors of abuse and sexual assault navigate the legal system.
00:53They provide drug addiction treatment services and overdose prevention services.
00:58They're working with young people. I'm going to submit some documents for the record, Mr. Chairman, that will help spell this out.
01:07Here's an article entitled Trump Delivers Massive Blow to Youth Justice Programs.
01:12Objection.
01:13April 29th. Here is a letter that we all received from the Conference of Chief Justices in the state court's administration
01:24expressing deep concerns about the termination of Department of Justice grants to our communities.
01:31And I also ask you now as consent to enter the record a letter dated April 25 from the Council of State Government's Justice Center
01:36to express profound concerns and strong opposition to the termination of Department of Justice grants,
01:42totaling hundreds of millions of dollars.
01:44I raise this because...
01:45I'm guessing.
01:46Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
01:47I raise it because, you know, some of our colleagues, well, they've been quite inscrutable in their reaction to what we've been talking about tonight.
01:56Sometimes it seems like I'm in a Quaker meeting house or, you know, a mega mime troupe or something
02:03because I'm trying to read people's facial expressions and their body language to see how they're reacting.
02:08But a lot of what we've been voting on are constitutional principles like due process and free speech and birthright citizenship.
02:15But this is something that really should unify all of us.
02:19And I want to warn all of my colleagues, Democrat and Republican,
02:22that there will be danger back home if you do not vote to restore these grants that have just been categorically cut.
02:30I've been so upset about it after I've spoken to some law enforcement from my state that I tried to track down where did this come from?
02:38And it didn't come from the House of Representatives.
02:40There was nobody pushing it here.
02:42As far as I can tell, it didn't come from everybody in the Senate.
02:44Nobody in the executive branch is identified with it except for someone who works for Doge.
02:50And I see a picture of him in a bow tie.
02:54The name is Tarak Makicha.
02:57And Tarak Makicha is the author of the Excel spreadsheet that destroyed hundreds of these grants
03:06to local law enforcement in our communities, to local victims and survivors groups in our communities,
03:13to anti-gang efforts, to juvenile assistance work and so on.
03:21And so I was just able to look Tarak Makicha up online.
03:26And this is a Doge employee.
03:32The bio on this employee's website goes back basically to Tesla from 2017 to 2019.
03:44They worked at Tesla in various roles, including head of strategic planning, Tesla Energy,
03:50chief of staff, North America sales and delivery, and global finance lead working capital and supply chain.
03:55Most recently, they've been the vice president of finance and operations at SkySafe since 2022.
04:03They attended the University of Texas and so on.
04:05Well, look, this person has essentially dismantled a lot of the infrastructure of funding
04:14to combat crime and violence and to assist victims in all of our districts.
04:21And so this amendment is simple.
04:22I don't know that any member of this committee or Congress would be saying,
04:27if this person had not simply wiped out all of this funding, we should be wiping out that funding.
04:32But this person did it.
04:34And that doesn't seem like a very sensible way to proceed procedurally.
04:39And I know that all of us are going to hear about it from people in our districts,
04:43if you have not already heard about it.
04:45And I don't want anybody to plead complete ignorance.
04:49This is our chance to reverse the damage right now.
04:52And especially for people who don't want to get into gun safety regulation,
04:56this is money that goes actually to try to create peace in the community,
05:01to fight gangs, to get kids off the streets.
05:04All that money is being cut right now.
05:06And so what this amendment does, Mr. Chairman, is simply to restore all of these cuts
05:12that were made by this individual, as far as I can tell.
05:16I thank you, and I yield back.
05:17Gentleman yields back.
05:18Mr. Chairman, gentleman from New York.
05:20I move to strike the last word.
05:21Gentleman's recognized.
05:22I just want to emphasize a couple of points that the ranking member so eloquently made
05:29and make sure that my Republican colleagues who talk very much about caring about public safety
05:38and caring so much about fighting crime and law and order understand that the grants
05:49that were yanked away from so many of these organizations makes our communities less safe.
06:01It makes fighting violent crime, gangs, guns, drug trafficking, much, much more difficult.
06:13That's what these grants do.
06:14These grants, in various different ways, some of them go to local law enforcement.
06:21Some of them go to local organizations that keep kids out of gangs, that keep guns off of our streets,
06:31that reduce demand for guns.
06:33These are proven, proven to be effective programs.
06:38And it's not even just that we decide, okay, in the future we're not going to fund these grants.
06:45It is actually grants that have already been appropriated, have already been obligated,
06:51and in some cases have already been spent down because they're in the budgets of these organizations,
06:59and yet they're just yanked away by an administration that talks so much about public safety.
07:08And we hear over and over, apparently, you know, of the, you would listen to the president,
07:16of the 5 million undocumented immigrants who came over the border in the last four years,
07:23I think the way he talks, it's got to be about 4,950,000 of them must be criminals or drug dealers or rapists
07:35because certainly everybody I hear about is a, you know, a violent criminal.
07:44Obviously, the data doesn't bear that out.
07:46In fact, the data shows that Americans commit a much higher proportion of crimes than immigrants do.
07:54But if you want to make our country safe, I think there's an expression, make America safe again.
08:05Isn't that one of the expressions?
08:08You would think that you would want to invest in programs in law enforcement that actually do make us safe.
08:16But once again, this president, this administration, and the complicit Republicans in the House are all talk, no action.
08:28Because if you truly wanted to put your vote where your mouth is,
08:34you would 100% support this amendment and ensure that our communities are kept safe by these critical, critical programs.
08:44Will the gentleman yield?
08:45Yes, of course I will yield.
08:46And thank you for that powerful statement you just made.
08:50My amendment would require DOJ to reinstate grant funding to hundreds of groups.
08:55Here's one of the ones that contacted my office, the National Policing Institute.
09:00And they have a program where they provide critical support to local and county law enforcement under the, quote, rural violent crime reduction initiative.
09:11So they're able to take the money and put it into rural areas to fight violent crime.
09:16And they've gotten the grant.
09:18They were expecting the grant.
09:20They were counting on the grant.
09:21And whoever this person is, not the House of Representatives, not the Senate, I'm not hearing anybody in the cabinet taking credit for it,
09:29but whoever this person is in DOJ, which sometimes fashions itself a fourth branch of government, just slashed all of that money.
09:37Is there a single member of Congress who knew this was going to happen?
09:41Is there a single member of Congress who wanted this to happen?
09:44And now they're going to be showing up in our offices saying, we had a whole program for fighting violent crime in rural areas, which is gone now.
09:55We had a whole program for reaching out to young people with an after-school program.
10:01And now it's gone.
10:03And what are we going to say?
10:05Well, we didn't know anything about it.
10:06I'm afraid at this point we are burdened with the knowledge that DOJ has done this.
10:11And so I thank the gentleman for yielding.
10:14I hope everybody can support this amendment.
10:19Gentleman yields back.