Your rank and file ATF agent isn’t the one walking into your local gun store to see if they’re complying with the rules for FFLs. That’s the job of a team of inspectors who have no actual arrest powers. They’re different entities entirely.
And I’ve always figured the reason so many of those inspectors loved the “zero tolerance” policy of the Biden administration is that it let them feel powerful, but that’s mostly based on how zealous some of them seemed.
Unfortunately for them, it seems things are about to change.
As Cam detailed last week, the ATF is looking to downsize the number of its inspectors, and by quite a bit.
In a massive restructuring move under the Trump administration’s ongoing government overhaul, the U.S. Department of Justice announced plans to eliminate over 1,000 positions at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF)—including more than 500 industry operations investigators (IOIs), the very people tasked with conducting compliance inspections of licensed gun dealers.
The plan, outlined in the DOJ’s FY 2026 budget proposal, marks the most significant gutting of the ATF in modern history. The agency is being dissolved as a standalone entity and merged into the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) as part of a broader effort to “reduce duplicative functions and infrastructure.”
A Victory for Accountability & FFL Relief
For America’s 60,000+ Federal Firearms Licensees (FFLs), the news comes as a long-awaited reprieve. The same investigators being let go are the ones responsible for suspending or revoking licenses over minor clerical errors—sometimes a missed date or a transposed digit on a 4473 form. Under the Biden-era “zero tolerance” policy, these errors were enough to put family-run gun shops out of business.
“Cutting the ATF’s inspection force by 40% is a game-changer,” said a longtime FFL holder in Arizona. “It means fewer surprise inspections, less harassment, and more room to focus on actually serving customers and staying in business.”
The downsizing also saves taxpayers an estimated $82 million specifically from reductions in regulatory inspections, and $354 million overall from staffing cuts that include both IOIs and other support personnel.
Of course, this spurred some outrage.
Once again, the Trump admin is putting our safety at risk to enrich gun CEOs. Gutting inspections helps no one but rogue gun dealers and those who seek to do us harm. It puts all of our families at risk. https://t.co/ztqpnHHeS7
— GIFFORDS (@GIFFORDS_org) June 19, 2025
Inspections will still happen, for one thing. They’re just not going to have as many of them.
Second, those who “seek to do us harm” are generally not buying from licensed gun dealers in the first place. When they do, though, they usually have clean records, and there’s no evidence that the gun dealer in question did anything wrong.
Then we have the inane claim that this is going to “enrich gun CEOs.”
How?
No gun store knows if or when they’ll be inspected, even if the odds of them doing so are reduced to some extent. They’re not going to screw around in hopes that the laws of probability protect them. Especially as most are more interested in complying with the law than risking prison for some silly reason. They might not like the laws, but they’ll follow them.
Because of that, this isn’t likely to increase gun sales in any way. Gun control does, mind you, so they do a pretty good job of enriching those CEOs all on their own, but reducing inspectors does no such thing.
But I think Giffords knows this.
This is nothing more than them trying to latch onto class warfare rhetoric to push their agenda, not realizing that no one who doesn’t already agree with them will be moved by this nonsense.
Read the full article here
