Congress Must Reject White House’s Proposal to Defund CRS in FY 2027 and Remove of CRS from the Civil Rights Act of 1964

The White House’s budget request for FY2027 as to the Community Relations Service is based on fiction, fantasy, and falsehood. The call for statutory dissolution and defunding of CRS demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of CRS's history, mission, and absolutely necessary work to advance DOJ's mission to "fight crime and protect American communities" (as correctly summarized by the WH).

The WH says DOJ's top priority is to reduce violent crimes. That is core to CRS's mission, and CRS has successfully fulfilled it over six decades.

Thus, nothing can be further from the truth than the White House's so-called justification: "CRS has a long track record of supporting fringe leftist organizations such as Black Lives Matter and legitimizing riotous behavior that puts America’s police in the crosshairs." This is patently false and relies on conspiracy-theory-driven internet fantasies about CRS's work.

CRS has indeed provided mediation and conciliation services in incidents involving BLM, but so often the same incidents involved participation by police departments, synagogues, Christian schools, and even White supremacist groups -- who all requested and accepted CRS's services as neutral, impartial, and confidential mediators. As long as a group sought CRS's help and desired non-violent solutions to conflicts within CRS's civil rights/hate crimes purview, CRS provided services to all groups, regardless of their ideology or viewpoints. (See a summary of CRS's history on this website.)

The Trump Administration labels CRS as a "woke enterprise" for doing the statutorily required work of “preventing and resolving racial and ethnic tensions, incidents, and civil disorders, and in restoring racial stability and harmony.” That mission, along with hate crimes prevention, came directly from the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Faire Housing Act of 1968, the Church Arson Prevention Act of 1996, Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crimes Acts of 2007 and 2016, and the Shepard-Byrd Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009 -- signed into law by Presidents of both parties with bipartisan support.

CRS’s mission represents specific, historical expressions of Constitutional values as pronounced in these civil rights and hate crimes laws. If that is woke, then the Constitution is woke. And this budget request is yet another affront to and attack on the Constitution by the current administration.

In addition, Congress has renewed funding for CRS every year since 1964 in an unbroken commitment to its mission. That includes this year's $20M, passed and signed by President Trump in January. Yet, the White House's FY2027 budget document for DOJ shows that it intends to spend only $1M this year, in open defiance of Congressional will.

As it did for FY2026, Congress must reject this request, restore CRS as a stand-alone agency as created by law, and fund CRS fully for FY2027.