The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATFE) has been the bete noir for gun owners and the Second Amendment movement for decades. Famous for arbitrary rulings and ham-fisted bureaucratic overreach, the BATFE has few friends to mourn their misfortune under the Trump administration's slashing of the bureaucracy.
The dream, among many in the Second Amendment movement, is to simply do away with them.
There is, of course, no such thing as "simply" doing away with an executive branch bureaucracy.
But earlier in the Trump administration, the notion of at least consolidating the BATFE with another abstruse "alphabet" government law enforcement agency popped up; if you can't get rid of the agency, the theory went, at least reduce some of the duplication.
The U.S. Justice Department plans to press ahead with a merger of its two agencies that investigate drug and firearms offenses, though the effort would still need approval from Congress, four sources familiar with the matter told Reuters...The proposal to merge the ATF and DEA first surfaced in March, when Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche floated the idea in a memo that proposed a broader series of major structural changes at the Justice Department.
What might make fiscal sense, however, could be a big problem in civil liberties terms. The Gun Owners of America are not on board:
🚨BREAKING🚨
— Gun Owners of America (@GunOwners) May 30, 2025
The White House just officially proposed merging ATF & DEA. Just imagine:
👎3x ATF budget
👎4x ATF tactical units
👎+10,000 new employees
👎reduced oversight & accountability
Merging is NOT abolishing, it's a DANGEROUS Trojan Horse. pic.twitter.com/yBYr2FooA5
Mark Chesnutt at Truth about Guns elaborates:
Of course, a plan to combine the agencies brings up some very important questions that haven’t been answered at this time. First, who would control the agency? Also, what might they use the authority for, not just now but under subsequent administrations?
The plan would also combine policy offices in Washington and eliminate certain field office that work on antitrust, environmental and other matters. Most tax division attorneys, along with employees in the section that handles public corruption cases, would be reassigned to U.S. attorneys’ offices.
For American gun owners and gun-rights groups opposed to the measure, it might be the first time they have agreed with anti-gun groups on any issue. Emma Brown, executive director of gun-ban organization Giffords, said the plan “would be literally defunding the police.”
And now the Firearms Policy Coalition - the legal powerhouse behind many of the Second Amendment movement's victories at the Supreme Court - is weighing in:
“The DOJ’s dangerous proposal would consolidate the ATF and DEA into an authoritarian ‘super-agency’ with the combined powers to wage the failed war on drugs and enforce unconstitutional federal gun control laws against all Americans, not just violent criminals and drug cartels,” FPC said in a recent press release. “By merging the ATF’s firearms enforcement authority into the DEA, the DOJ is effectively equating peaceable American gun owners with drug cartels, turning millions of law-abiding citizens—as well as their constitutionally protected weapons—into co-equal targets of a militarized federal enforcement regime.”
According to the FPC, the organization has provided many proposed reforms to the White House, DOJ and ATF, all of which would improve the lives of law-abiding Americans as well as access to rights and instruments protected by the Constitution. FPC believes that rather than creating massive new problems for gun owners, the DOJ should instead focus on implementing these proposed reforms, stop engaging in anti-Second Amendment litigation and prosecutions and support important Second Amendment challenges in the courts, especially the United States Supreme Court.
It took decades and lots of legislative and judicial wrangling to get the country into the state it's in. It's going to take more of both to undo the damage.
