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Over the next week or so, House and Senate negotiators will try to hammer out the differences in their competing budgets. Among the major bones of contention: disagreements over how deeply to cut Medicaid; whether to make President Bush's expiring first-term tax cuts permanent; and whether to go along with the president's proposal to slash funding for a wide range of programs related to homeland security. No, President Bush is not gutting the Department of Homeland Security. The problem is Bush's definition of homeland security. Apparently, it doesn't include things like the safety of our streets. Especially the streets of our inner cities, which have become war zones. After plummeting during the 1990s, gang violence is making a bloody comeback all across America, with gang-related homicides up 50 percent since 1999. And how has our tough-on-security president responded? By proposing to cut close to a billion dollars from programs designed to help anti-gang efforts. His 2006 budget would cut more than $412 million from education, after-school and family-support programs that help keep at-risk kids away from gangs. It would eliminate Juvenile Accountability Block Grants ($54 million worth) designed to help prosecutors deal with gang issues. It would also reduce funding for the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) program by 95 percent, which could result in as many as 88,000 fewer police officers patrolling America's mean streets. And these proposed cuts come on top of a 44 percent reduction in delinquency-fighting and anti-gang funding since 2002. [more]