The Bureau of Alcohol, Cigarettes, Firearms and Explosives (a small government agency tasked with the challenge of Titanics to prevent the spread of illegal guns) has long been considered intervened stepchildren of federal law enforcement.
He is soon becoming an orphan.
The department responsible for enforcing gun laws and regulating firearm dealers enjoyed a short but consequential revival during the Biden administration. It expanded buyer background checks and cracked down on untraceable homemade weapons known as “ghost guns,” which took four years of propulsion and reduced the use of devices that convert standard weapons into machine guns.
That was over when President Trump took office. Since then, the ATF, a division of the Department of Justice, has been destroyed by the departure of key career staff, the shift of dozens of agents from core duties to immigration enforcement, and a diversion into a campaign of indifference.
On Wednesday morning, around 10,000 ATF employees were handed over by distracted caretaker, FBI director Kash Patel, and dumped at the Army Secretary's bureaucratic gateway. Secretary Daniel Driscoll was only told he was suffering from a challenge a few days ago, according to people familiar with the situation where he spoke about the terms of anonymity to discuss the matter publicly.
A very unusual move placed civilian military leaders who had first ever remembered domestic law enforcement, and the administration's critics were able to quickly identify ominous motives.
The truth was less intimidating when agency Republicans wanted to handcuff and try to alienate them. Patel was too busy doing his day's work, and Driscoll was confirmed by the Senate.
The fact that Driscoll, a close friend of Vice President JD Vance, has never had the experience of not stopping the White House from bashing him for work. (Driscoll became a proficient in firearms as a cavalry scout with the Iraqi Army's 10th Mount Division.)
“We have already witnessed the four-year Trump administration in short supply and undermining the ATF's important role,” said T. Christian Hayne, policy director for Brady, a gun violence prevention organization.
“The appointment of another representative director — one already tasked with overseeing more than a million US soldiers — shows a complete disregard for public safety and American life,” he added.
It is not clear why, or when, or when, the White House decided to remove and replace Patel. However, the administrative authorities apparently decided relatively early on that Patel's time would be shorter after the February pledge and settled on Driscoll as their successor.
Patel appeared to be eager to take responsibility on his part, despite telling his friends in recent weeks that he was most likely to serve in the near future, simply because he had not been able to find an off-ramp.
To say that ATF was not his top priority is an understatement. Patel has only visited the ATF headquarters once, stayed for several hours and is known to have not returned despite his visits several times by his top deputy deputy Dan Bongino.
If Driscoll plans to spend there, it's not clear how much time he has. He was often abroad and traveled to Germany on Wednesday, when his appointment was made public.
The department's leadership was virtually non-existent — even top-ranked career staff on the ground, Marvin Richardson has been kicked out — and morale has plummeted at headquarters, said current and former employees.
Despite this uncertainty, most of the investigators' department staff have worked with minimal disruption and have played a key role in the major drug and crime busts told by the Trump administration.
Many of the frontline employees of the Bureau are actually conservatives who support Trump and embrace his message of law and order. And as far as Trump administration officials have discussed the future of the ATF, it has turned to reducing regulatory functions while strengthening its role in drug cases and immigration.
Dozens of agents have been diverted to strengthen the presence of federal law enforcement in immigrant raids. Speaking recently on an internal conference call, Patel came up with the idea of ​​reallocating around 1,000 of the ATF's most experienced agents to the FBI, but later settled on about 125 details, many of them up to the southern border.
The larger Justice Department reorganization plan, recently written by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche in close cooperation with the White House, proposed a merger between the ATF and the Drug Enforcement Agency.
The proposal was greeted with careful optimism within the ATF. It can provide great long-term stability for both organizations and frequently collaborates. However, it requires Congressional approval and could take years to implement it.
There are some indications that the Trump administration wants to find a permanent Senate-designated leader.
Over the past two months, Trump appointees have quietly interviewed several candidates to become permanent directors, including renowned gun rights lawyer Michael D. Fawcett. However, no one has panned out. According to people familiar with the situation, one applicant withdrew from consideration when he learned a salary of less than $250,000 a year.
The ATF paradox was that it sparked intense scrutiny during a burst of regulatory activities under the Democratic president, obscuring when Republicans turned over for a few pens as both targets for the second amendment movement and fundraising magnets, when they turned back on by a few pens.
Earlier this week, Attorney General Pam Bondy rolled back the scope of Biden-era gun control measures, including crackdowns on federal authorized gun sellers who forge business records and skip background checks for customers.
She also directed the ATF to review two other major policies enacted under the Biden administration, turning to scrapping both. One is the prohibition of so-called pistol braces used to convert handguns into weapons like rifles, and the second is the rule that requires background checks for civilian gun sales.
That doesn't mean that the administration is less aggressive. Mr Bondy also announced his intention to convene a task force to expand gun rights and reused the department's Civil Rights Division to launch an investigation into regional violations of the Second Amendment Rights that seek to regulate firearms and regulate violent crimes.
But for now, the ATF looks like an afterthought, not a focus.
One of the people who predicted the current scenario was Stephen M. Detelbach, who resigned as director of the department in December after pushing for some of the most important gun control measures in decades.
“What I'm worried about is that people take their eyes off the ball and they're either satisfied or political,” he said in an interview just before leaving.
“That means more people will be killed.”
