We haven’t heard a peep about the proposed merger of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives and the Drug Enforcement Agency in several months, and according to CNN there’s a good reason for that; the plan has been quietly shelved after getting enormous pushback from pro-Second Amendment groups.
The gun control lobby was opposed to the plan as well, but as you’d expect, those views didn’t do much in shaping the White House’s plans, according to CNN.
Administration officials’ expectations that pro-Trump gun-rights groups would welcome the plans were dashed almost immediately.
Some conservative and gun-rights groups have long called for the ATF’s abolishment but raised concerns that a merger with another agency would empower the agency’s gun-related efforts, not weaken them. The MAGA groups want ATF gone and the laws it enforces repealed. Giving its powers to another agency makes things worse, a gun rights source told CNN.
“Regulating guns is a hot potato. Everyone is for eradicating illegal drugs. Not everyone is for gun regulation,” one person involved in the Trump administration discussions that followed the Blanche memo told CNN.
That unnamed gun rights source is correct. Ditching the ATF altogether is one thing, but so long as the laws and regulations the agency enforces remain in place, then some federal agency is going to be doing that work. For Second Amendment-friendly groups and many 2A advocates, it’s a case of the devil you know versus the devil you don’t.
Democrats and left-leaning gun control groups also decried the plan as an attempt to sideline ATF and harm efforts to reduce gun violence. But at the White House, the backlash from conservatives froze any momentum for the merger. Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff, was initially in favor of merging the agencies but later came to advocate for the ATF’s role in crime-fighting efforts in cities, a top priority for the president, people briefed on the matter said.
“At some point, no one seemed to want to own the idea of a merger,” the person involved in the administration’s discussions told CNN.
Attorney General Pam Bondi was the last official to publicly back the idea, and that came in testimony before Congress last June. During a hearing held by the House Commerce-Justice-Science appropriations subcommittee, Bondi declared that “guns and drugs go together,” and that a merger would be “great for our country.”
After Bondi was roundly criticized for those comments, the Trump administration quietly left the plan in limbo.
Sources inside ATF told CNN that while there was an initial panic over what would happen if the plan to combine the two agencies came to fruition, those fears quickly dissipated as time went on without any logistical updates of how, or when, the merger would take place.
“We’ve been operating as if that’s off the table for months now,” one law enforcement official told CNN. “Everyone is just like, ‘that’s a funny little thing they tried to do. Let’s just keep moving.’”
As CNN notes, even without a formal merger many ATF agents have been tasked with helping enforce federal immigration law, which is itself a double-edged sword for 2A supporters. On the one hand, that means fewer ATF agents in the field harassing lawful gun owners over their hardware or whether or not they’re “engaged in the business” of dealing firearms. On the other hand, the precedent set by the Trump administration could easily be co-opted the next time a Democrat is in the White House. It’s not hard to imagine a liberal, anti-gun president deciding to pull ICE and CBP agents from their jobs enforcing federal immigration law and instead diverting them to the ATF in order to crack down on gun owners, gun sellers, and gun makers.
For now that remains a hypothetical concern. I’d say the biggest issue regarding ATF at the moment is that Congress is poised to trim the ATF’s budget by just $40 million even though President Trump proposed a $400 million haircut for the agency. The House has already passed an appropriations bill that gives the ATF more than $1.5 billion in its operating budget, and the Senate could soon follow suit.
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