Rogers Remarks at Budget Hearing on the Fiscal Year 2026 Request for the Department of Justice
I’d like to welcome our witness, the Honorable Pam Bondi, Attorney General of the United States, to testify on the Department of Justice’s Fiscal Year 2026 budget. To begin, I want to thank the Attorney General for speaking at the Rx and Illicit Drug Summit this past April.
This summit gathers the best and brightest minds to discuss ways our nation can tackle the opioid and addiction crisis impacting every corner of America. At this year’s summit, we received some encouraging news from the CDC that overdose deaths have decreased by nearly 30 percent. Unfortunately, we still lost over 80,000 loved ones in 2024 and recent provisional data from the CDC suggests that the progress that has been made might be coming to an end. Significantly more work needs to be done to curb opioid addiction, including focusing on the precursor chemicals being produced in China and the manufacturing labs in Mexico, as well as tracking down the cartels and criminals that shop these drugs in our nation. The Department of Justice must keep this at the top of their priority list.
Unfortunately, your job as the nation’s top law enforcement official will not be easy and the list of issues that the American people are counting on you to address is long and dangerous. From fentanyl and immigration to violent crime and supporting local law enforcement, the Department of Justice needs to uphold the rule of law and equal justice, while tackling the most dangerous situations confronting Americans.
To make matters even more difficult, this all must be accomplished within a budget that needs to be right sized for efficiency and effectiveness. The Department of Justice’s fiscal year 2026 budget request totals just under $34 billion. This represents a reduction of close to $3 billion from the fiscal year 25 enacted level.
Specifically, the request includes approximately $11 billion to target violent crime, $10 billion to tackle drug crimes, over $3 billion to defend the nation and our citizens against transnational organized crime, and over $3.5 billion to address immigration. These are the exact issues that hit home for many families and these are the issues that are being discussed between neighbors in my state of Kentucky to states across the nation. After four years of politicization at the Biden Department of Justice, these are the issues that the American people expect you to address.
They want a Department of Justice that protects American citizens from violent crime, not one that is weaponized against them for speaking their minds. Thus far, we have seen much progress on many of these fronts, including an Administration that is taking the nation’s borders seriously.
Attorney General Bondi, I stand ready to support you and your efforts to ensure that the American public lives in a society that is free from crime and abuse. I look forward to hearing more from you today regarding the fiscal year 2026 budget request, the cuts that are proposed, and the outcomes that you expect to see if this budget is enacted. There are critically important funding decisions ahead of us and I hope we gain a better sense of your priorities today so that we can make the best decision on behalf of the American public. I would now like to recognize the Ranking Member of this Subcommittee, Ms. Meng, for any remarks she may wish to make.
