DoJ puts in budget requests to Congress, which then grants, modifies, or denies them as it sees fit. Heads of agency have a surprisingly limited amount of budgetary autonomy; they can't just reroute millions of dollars because they think it would be sensible. Check out pages 59-62 of this document to get an idea of amount of begging required for the pissant sum of $2 million bucks: http://www.justice.gov/jmd/2011justification/pdf/fy11-usa-ju...
Congress has the power of the purse, and can keep the executive branch on a very short lease if it chooses. Meantime, subjects of an investigation can often borrow a tactic from civil litigation and bury the other side (in this case, the DoJ) with heaps of irrelevant or incidental material that will be enormously time-consuming to sort through.
Partly because of Congressional funding decisions going back for years and partly because of inefficiency, government legal investigators are badly lacking in the technical department. Sadly, this state of affairs suits some people very well.
It is hard for me to believe that if Eric Holder and/or Barack Obama were loudly saying "Wall Street is getting away because you aren't giving us funding", things would not change.
... I think the "suits some people very well" part is most to the point. It is hard not to imagine that this group includes those at the highest ranks of government.
Oh come on. Every time Obama says the word 'regulate' someone in the Republican party says it's a 'jobs killer.' [EDIT: 8 out of 10 #is wrong; ooops] 6 out of 8 of the GOP presidential candidates claim they'd slash funding for the courts, with Newt Gingrich saying he'd just ignore Supreme Court rulings completely if he disagreed with them. Sure, that's just big talk designed to get cheap news coverage, but surely you've noticed there's a bit of a political stalemate in DC right now.
Congress has the power of the purse, and can keep the executive branch on a very short lease if it chooses. Meantime, subjects of an investigation can often borrow a tactic from civil litigation and bury the other side (in this case, the DoJ) with heaps of irrelevant or incidental material that will be enormously time-consuming to sort through.
Partly because of Congressional funding decisions going back for years and partly because of inefficiency, government legal investigators are badly lacking in the technical department. Sadly, this state of affairs suits some people very well.