So…department of education?

Also knowing that you’re guaranteed to be “downsized” on the first day of the next party change in the White House.

I was really curious to learn more about CFPB's financing, I found an article about Trump slashing their budget by a quarter but I haven't been able to find anything about their funding year by year.

It's turbo fucked if they haven't refunded them because they've returned billions to consumers by prosecuting fraudulent organizations like Wells Fargo!!

That's "Starve the Beast" politics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast

Everyone should know what this is and how and why it is done.

In short, Republicans want to starve a department of funding to a level below which they can not properly function. Then they can claim that agency isn't doing it's job, so we might as well cut it altogether. They are trying to set up these departments and programs to fail and can come in and claim they are saving taxpayers money. What they are really doing is making it easier for corporations and the ultra rich to pollute or side-step their tax obligations. Kind of hard to claim someone is a tax cheat if there isn't an IRS to audit them. Same with the EPA, Amtrak, USPS, DoEducation, and a host of other departments.

Once again, we can thank Reagan for this mess.

They've got to earn their $16 million a year from the gun lobby by doing even less than they did back before Sandy Hook, when it was only $8 million a year.

Isn't it just grand to look back on the last 365 days of gun violence and see what figures people put on it? Tens of thousands of lives. Hundreds of them children.

The pro-gun crowd will bury them just to avoid inconvenience. They don't want to wait for their guns, pass a background check, demonstrate they know how to responsibly handle them or store them securely.

Sure, they'll jerk themselves raw as they publicly congratulate themselves for doing any of those, but the moment someone wants to turn "suggestions" into "laws", they're all too happy to be represented by overweight men stuffed into plate carriers.

For the politicians and manufacturers though, it's strictly business.

Republicans get $16 million a year and a bloc of voters who will tolerate all manner of horrific acts, as long as they happen to other people.

In return, they insist that we mustn't change a thing until every man, woman and child in America has been completely cured of mental illness, to a level far beyond current medical science, so perfectly that nobody ever relapses and all in the few days it takes to load up on semi-automatic firearms.

Not only can you buy their souls, they're not even that expensive.

Prevention of gun violence isn’t exactly the remit of either of those agencies. The ATF focuses on the tracking of and illegal sales of guns while the FBI focuses on crimes committed with them (and other crimes, of course). Neither of those are about prevention of gun violence.

A separate agency that can focus more on the social issues that are behind gun violence could act in many ways that neither of the other two agencies could while not having to worry about drawing focus or manpower, from how those two agencies operate.

Maybe not encourage guns to be sold to cartels, unlike the ATF Fast and Furious program. It was supposed to track firearms going south, but just lost them.

Shoot your cat and goldfish instead of just your spouse and your dog

People said the same thing about DHS when it was spawned forth into being. Maybe not a great comparison, but I feel like this one has a little more purpose to it other than job creation.

To go along with all the prayers.

If they focus on policy that isn't gun control it will help. If they only exist to push gun control you're prolly right. Either way, gun stores will prolly win when the nutters go buy more rifles.

Yep going harder on gun control stuff is going to do nothing but lose votes for Democrats. Because if you're already anti-gun then you're voting [D] anyway right? Personally I'm never voting for any politician who proposes to limit any freedoms. I'm pro-freedom only. I don't really have much to vote for these days.

As expected every time guns are brought up in a political context, the comments are already full of people talking past each other while ignoring the real issues.

It is exactly as difficult to get rid of guns in this country as it would be to get rid of the electoral college, and the electoral college has done thing like lead directly to the covid pandemic being far worse than it had to be because Trump fired the guy we had in position to warn everyone if China leaked a pandemic.

Instead of discussing that, all you're going to find in a thread like this is back and forth about getting rid of guns (nearly impossible) or decrying the department as redundant (the DHS is proof this is also meaningless) or the like.