Half a mil to put their thumbs up their asses instead of just literally giving that money directly as reparations 
Edit: I want to clarify, I fully support reparations, I'm just extremely frustrated knowing that, under liberal/bourgeoisie democracy, these types of efforts tend to get bogged down with means testing, and sometimes outright turn into thinly-veiled handouts to private corporations. All while the police budget is still increasing YOY.
That said, Evanston (city on Chicago's northern border) did actually manage to distribute "...$25,000 in no-strings-attached direct cash payments for those eligible. Black residents who lived in Evanston during a 50-year period of discriminatory zoning laws and their direct descendants receive priority for eligibility." So I don't want to encourage further reactionary criticisms such as mine towards this specific subcommittee if they are able to achieve at least some form of direct payments similar to Evanston's program.
I’m so glad the USSR didn’t take OP’s approach of “planning Schmanning, we’ll ignore it because overhead is wasteful.” You can spend a lot up front and it’ll be costly but might actually happen and even finish somewhat on time, or try to save up front and never end up finishing and wasting a colossal amount of labor and resources.
Pop open a thread about the USSR or the PRC and you'll find plenty of people praising central planning and the role it played in rapid economic development, and you might also find critiques that amount to "you should have better examined the effects of trying to eradicate sparrows."
It's OK to be skeptical of government power, waste, and corruption, but deep cynicism about government ever being able to do anything right is a core reactionary belief.
Hasn't pretty much every single study of means testing ever showed it wasted more money than it saved?
Like what are the qualifications of these people, are they acting in good faith or are they going to be collecting a salary to make sure they don't accidently give any black people too much money?
I think there's a huge difference between criticizing central planning and critciszing how liberal think tanks distribute resources to poor people.
This isn't a think tank, and the one example of reparations we have (Evanston, right down the road) is not means tested.