Funding Highlights from Justice’s FY 2024 Budget Request

As the agency responsible for upholding the rule of law, the Department of Justice requests $39.7B in FY 2024 discretionary funding, a 6% increase over FY 2023 enacted levels. With the rising threat from adversaries and the Biden Administration’s push for justice, fairness and equality, DOJ’s budget increase reflects priorities in federal law enforcement to combat gun violence and violent crime, criminal justice system reformation, civil rights protection, and cyber threat analysis and identification.  

The department’s budget is based on DOJ’s five strategic goals: Uphold the rule of law; Keep our country safe; Protect civil rights; Ensure economic opportunity and fairness; Administer just court and correctional systems. As such, Justice’s budget is broken down into the following areas of responsibilities:

Source: Department of Justice

From a DOJ agency component perspective, nearly all of the department’s top bureaus request increases in FY 2024, including the FBI ($11.4B, +6%), USMS ($4.1B, +10%), DEA ($2.7B, +10%) and ATF ($1.9B, +22%). Though the increases seek to bolster the DOJ agencies in their perspective missions, additional FY 2024 funding is really centered around law enforcement, cybersecurity and streamlining the department’s operations.

Law Enforcement:

DOJ’s total budget for law enforcement includes $5.6B in additional resources fulfill the department’s first two strategic goals of enforcing the law and keeping the nation safe. Specific increases under law enforcement include:

• +$89M across FBI, DEA, ATF and USMS to support body worn camera program implementation
• +$28M in research and development programs under NIJ to continue discovery of policies and practices to improve U.S. policing
• +$9M to expand Operation Overdrive, the DEA’s data-driven approach to identifying and dismantling criminal drug networks
• +$6.3M to upgrade and replace electronic surveillance equipment that provides critical technological support to USMS fugitive investigations
• +$3.1M to secure communications and allow the FBI to sustain and further secure access to classified information systems in remote settings and complete investigative activities in a timely manner

Cybersecurity:

According to OMB, DOJ estimated spending on cybersecurity in FY 2024 is $1.4B. Within budget documents, DOJ reports $180M in cyber program enhancements for FY 2024, with increases among the FBI, JIST account, U.S. Attorney’s Office and the National Security Division. Specific cyber increases include:

• +$63M to bolster FBI’s resources to enable operations with federal state, local and international partners, including cyber threat identification and analysis, and cyber workforce development
• +$55M at the OCIO towards implementing zero trust architecture for unclassified systems and National Security systems, as well as cybersecurity event logging
• +$27M at the FBI for effective cyber technologies to protect its systems, including zero trust architecture to harden networks, access controls and system security

Operational Efficiencies

• +$367M, including 150 new immigration judges and staff to reduce the backlog of immigration court cases
• +10M to modernize DEA case management system and data capabilities, including implementing a unified data platform to increase DEA capacity for processing and analyzing intelligence

Other:

• Supports the relocation of FBI Headquarters to a suburban location with a $3.5B allocation to the Federal Capital Revolving Fund (FCRF)
• The budget provides over $36M in additional funding towards vehicle fleet electrification

IT Budget

Cyber-related investments within DOJ’s IT budget, found in the Federal IT Dashboard, provides much the same story as discretionary budget documents: the department is investing more to protect its systems and boost cyber oversight. Below is a list of DOJ cyber-related IT investments with FY 2024 totals and dollar increases from FY 2023:

• JMD Cybersecurity Initiatives, $179M in FY 2024 (+$55M)
• BOP Security, $145M total in FY 2024 (+$61M)
• FBI Enterprise Security Operations Center, $38M total in FY 2024 (+$1.3M)
• DEA IT Security, $37M total in FY 2024 (+$1.5M)
• USA IT Security Program, $27M total in FY 2024 (+$10M)
• ATF IT Security, $5.5M total in FY 2024 (+$162K)

Two additional IT investments with significant increases in FY 2024 include the FBI Network Services and CRT General IT Infrastructure programs. Network Services is the engineering, operation and maintenance of the FBI’s secure IT network infrastructure and requests $173M in FY 2024, a $135M increase over FY 2023. CRT General Infrastructure includes the costs associated with hardware, software, maintenance, on-site support, and help desk. That investment requests $63M in FY 2024, a $58M increase from FY 2023 levels.

One investment facing a substantial decrease in FY 2024 is the DOJ WCF Contributions program, which is DOJ’s Working Capital Fund (WCF) for shared services. The investment seeks $144M in FY 2024, a $372M deduction from FY 2023. The IT budget does not offer a reason for the decrease, although the DOJ’s IG has cited past issues with processes surrounding the WCF that may have impacted the deduction.

For more analysis on the FY 2024 budget request, refer to Deltek’s new report FY 2024 Federal Budget Request: Priorities and Opportunities.