Outgoing FBI Director Robert Mueller urged Senate lawmakers Thursday to place the bureau on equal financial footing in the ongoing budget battle, saying a failure to do so would mean a significant step backward amid what he called the most complex threat environment in the bureau’s history.
While Mueller said most essential operations would go on in the event of a government shutdown, he said some non-essential staff face furloughs and some investigations like child pornography cases would be suspended.
The agency was allocated $7.9 billion in 2010, and asked for $8.3 billion for the 2011 fiscal year. The 2012 request splits the difference, with a request for $8.1 billion.
“We need Congress’ continued support more than ever,” Mueller told members of a prominent Senate Appropriations subcommittee. He said the bureau faces a $200 million funding gap if Congress passed a continuing resolution to keep spending at 2010 levels. He said a budget cut is disconcerting and would represent a stoppage of “momentum” for the FBI. The bureau must then leave some 1,100 job openings vacant.
“We cannot be considered equal partners in the intelligence [community] without equal funding,” Mueller said. He said the CIA and Defense Department are getting preferential treatment in the budget debate because both would be fully funded for the rest of the year.
Apart from the immediate concern facing federal employees, Mueller stressed the need for increasing FBI funding to combat global and domestic terrorism, mortgage fraud and cyberterrorism. But border security is one area where funding increases weren’t addressed or offered.
Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, said the brutal violence on the Mexican border is concerning. “Mr. Director, we’re in a war there,” Hutchison said.
She pointed to the murder of two U.S. citizens this week as evidence that Mexico’s drug war is crossing over into Texas and the southwest. Hutchison said it’s a federal issue, and increasing, not decreasing resources should be the priority. “It’s not thousands of miles away, it is on our border,” Hutchison said.
“We have a pittance compared to what we need.”
Mueller said a supplemental bill in 2010 funded the creation of task forces to investigate drug violence on the border, but he said there was no plan to increase funding in the 2012 budget proposal.
Mueller, who took the director’s position two weeks before 9/11 and is widely praised for shepherding the FBI through tough times, said that transformation meant pulling 2,000 agents off of domestic crime issues.
“We have not had anywhere near the footprint we had in addressing narcotic cases since 9/11,” Mueller said. He said any funding increases over time have been to “build the national security side of the house” and said funding to fight the drug wars isn’t a budget priority.
Since 9/11, Mueller said the FBI workforce nearly doubled, to more than 36,000 employees – nearly 14,000 of them agents. He said the agents are essentially evenly distributed between national security and criminal cases.
The area that could face the biggest crisis in the wake of cuts is white-collar crime. Mueller said the FBI planned to add 150 agents focusing on mortgage fraud this year, now he doesn’t expect that to happen. “We assumed that we would be beefed up by the time we discussed the 2012 budget.”
Mueller’s 10-year term is up later this year, making him the second-longest tenured FBI director in the bureau’s history, after J. Edgar Hoover.
There was no mention about FBI involvement in the ongoing Libyan civil war. Senate members held a closed-door session where they planned to discuss cyberterrorism issues.