Spending bills reject Trump plans for DOJ overhaul

Ryan Tarinelli, CQ-Roll Call on Jul 21, 2025

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WASHINGTON — Republican appropriators are pushing back against Trump administration plans to shake up the structure of the Justice Department, signaling a break with the White House’s vision for the department.

President Donald Trump’s administration has aimed to end the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives as a separate component, relocate an anti-drug trafficking program to the department and eliminate the Office on Violence Against Women’s status as a separate office.

GOP lawmakers have avoided emphasizing their disagreement with the Trump plans. But buried in the fine print, fiscal 2026 funding bills from both the House and Senate signal that lawmakers are not on board with the overhaul proposals.

Both bills would effectively stymie a proposal to fold the work of the ATF into the Drug Enforcement Administration. Under the bills, the Office on Violence Against Women would retain its status as a distinct office, something the White House sought to wipe away.

The spending bills also signaled that the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas program would stay with the Office of National Drug Control Policy, instead of being moved to the Justice Department, like the Trump administration wanted.

Still, House GOP appropriators found overall agreement with the Trump administration on a range of areas. Fiscal 2026 proposals from both the White House and a Republican-controlled House subcommittee outlined cuts to the FBI, the ATF and the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General.

ATF overhaul

Perhaps the most significant DOJ reorganization plan is a proposal to fold the work of the ATF into the DEA — an idea that’s been met with fierce opposition from groups on both sides of the gun debate, but for different reasons.

Gun control advocates say it would weaken enforcement, while advocates for gun owner rights say the ATF’s mission would simply be moved to a better-funded agency that could target gun owners under a future administration.

Both House and Senate spending bills included language that would hamper a potential ATF-DEA merger, stipulating that no funds may be used to “transfer the functions, missions, or activities” of the ATF to “other agencies or departments.”

The Trump administration had requested that such language not be included.

Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., who leads the Senate Appropriations subcommittee that oversees DOJ funding, said law enforcement opposes the potential merger.

“I think it’s worthy of more conversation than what’s transpired so far,” Moran said of the merger idea, talking last week after a Senate Appropriations Committee meeting in which lawmakers approved their version of the Commerce-Justice-Science appropriations bill.

The House Commerce-Justice-Science Appropriations Subcommittee approved their version of the bill last week, and the full committee is scheduled to consider the measure on Thursday.

House Appropriations Chairman Tom Cole, R-Okla., said the merger decision is “basically an authorizing decision,” and not something that should be done in their bill.

The Justice Department has offered differing versions of what a merger might look like. A DOJ budget document stated that the ATF’s functions would be merged into the DEA.

“After absorbing select functions of ATF, DEA will remain as a single component,” the document stated.

But last month at a congressional hearing, Attorney General Pamela Bondi said the ATF would keep its “brand,” as would the DEA, but the agencies would be “going under one umbrella, one umbrella, doing away with the bureaucracy at the top.”

The Senate and House bills also rejected a White House request to delete a subsection of law that requires the Office on Violence Against Women to be “a separate and distinct office” within the DOJ, “not subsumed by any other office.”

The White House said in a budget document that the office “will be consolidated” into the Office of Justice Programs. Experts argue such a move would hamstring the office’s visibility and saddle victim grant programs with more bureaucracy.

And while the White House’s budget proposed moving the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas program from the Office of National Drug Control Policy to the Justice Department, both the House and Senate bills did not.

The program coordinates federal, state and local law enforcement agencies and has led to the dismantling of violent drug trafficking organizations, authorities said. Authorities and law enforcement groups have urged Congress to reject that proposal.

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