ICE Budget Now Bigger Than Most of the Militaries (newsweek.com)

This surely isn’t going to cause a lot of deaths in the next few years, no siree.

This is from almost two months ago and it doesn't even have information about the finalized version of the bill. Why is it posted like this now?

I still cannot understand how people understand the basis behind import controls and security for most things but blow a fuse when it comes to humans entering countries illegally.

The immigration numbers so far looks pretty encouraging. Illegal immigration is down 92%. The proposed budget works out to 37.5 billion dollars a year.

While that sounds overly excessive, the UK at a fifth of the population size is spending 6.5, billion pounds a year to encourage illegal immigrants to come into the country. I understand it's not a perfect comparison but I think it's worth pointing out that there are far stupider and more expensive ways that other countries are dealing with the same situation.

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Here's some other US federal agencies that also have annual budgets bigger than most of the world's militaries:

   - Food and Nutrition Service (USDA) (~$142B)
   - NIH (~$47B)
   - Tenant-Based Rental Assistance / Housing Choice Vouchers (HUD) (~$36B)
   - Pell Grant Program (~$34.5B)
   - Federal Highway Administration (DOT) (~$62.8B)
   - Environmental Protection Agency (~$41B, might be out of date)
   - Department of Energy (~$58B)
   - Department of State (~$58B)
   - Department of Housing and Urban Development (~$62B)
   - Department of Labor (~$98B)

Of course, none of those are ICE. What’s more interesting is that ICE’s budget jumped from $8B to ~$37B—a nearly five-fold increase. That should be the headline.

Comparing it to national militaries is a bit silly IMHO, since as the world’s largest economy the US federal government spends heavily across almost every sector.

It's incredible how priorities are so backwards.