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.
How do people think you go from supporting reparations as a concept to actually cutting checks and deciding who gets what? Are the people doing the work to get from concept to execution supposed to work for free?
This is what running a government looks like. Absent a specific critique about why this amount isn't needed, the takes objecting to this are just the reactionary "any dime the government spends on anything other than the end product is pure waste."
"I'll believe the government can do good when I see it" is a core reactionary idea. Its another strain of
we have to purge from ourselves if we're going to sell people on a system of government that we think should directly provide housing, healthcare, education, jobs, solutions to climate change, etc.
Really, how else would you go from concept to execution? Committes can be used to string people along, but they're also how you make big decisions in big organizations. Skepticism is warranted, but calling this nothing until the checks clear is not.
Good things occasionally do come out of capitalist democracy, though -- look at the reparations being paid right now in Evanston.
Understanding the flaws of capitalist democracy does not mean that style of democracy never ever ever does anything but harm. This is the appeal of liberalism -- you get occasional carrots, and all better options are snuffed out, so do you want the carrot or do you want nothing? The socialist criticism of that is that it'll never be enough, and will turn to fascism in a hearbeat; it's not that those carrots do not exist.
Salary and benefits for a 3 person team with a lawyer consulting will eat that up in a year easily.
That's a fair point, it's just hard to not be pessimistic when the same city is still spending $2 billion on their police budget and $29 mil to a private company for tents to house migrants (instead of just expropriating some unoccupied office buildings).
I'm not against spending large amounts of time, effort, and money on planning and executing reparations, I just have very little confidence that it can be done under liberal democracy without it turning into some market-based, means-tested program that is most certainly not reparations, all while other systems of harm are still being funded by several higher orders of magnitude. I will word my criticisms better in the future so as not to come off like I'm criticizing the very idea of planning and distributing reparations.
Skepticism is warranted, but there are reparations being paid right now 45 minutes down the road in Evanston. It's not a pipe dream; there's an actual working example right there.
We talk a lot here about how social programs in the USSR and Warsaw Pact countries served as an immediate example of how things could be done better, and how that pressured capitalist countries to make concessions in the same direction. Reparations programs can work the same way. We've seen this effect with LGBT rights and marijuana legalization recently, too.