President Donald Trump’s discretionary budget request for fiscal year 2026 has officially been released by the White House, and while he’s not proposing the ATF be totally defunded, he is demanding a major reduction in spending for the agency.
Under the budget proposal released today, the ATF would receive $468 million less than this year’s budget of roughly $1.62 billion, and the administration is citing the Biden administration’s weaponization of the agency as the rationale for the cuts.
The Budget bolsters the Second Amendment by cutting funding for ATF offices that have criminalized law-abiding gun ownership through regulatory fiat. The previous administration used the ATF to attack gun-owning Americans and undermine the Second Amendment by requiring near universal background checks; subjecting otherwise lawful gun owners to up to 10 years in prison for failing to register pistol braces that make it possible for disabled veterans to use firearms; the imposition of excessive restrictions on homemade firearms; and the revocation of Federal Firearms Licenses, which shut down small businesses across the Nation. The Budget re-prioritizes resources toward illegal firearms traffickers fueling violent crime and crime gun tracing that State and local law enforcement need to track down dangerous criminals, such as MS-13 gang members.
With proposed cuts to the FBI and DEA as well, expect Democrats claim that it’s Trump who’s interested in defunding the police, and for gun control groups to raise hell in particular about the ATF’s budget, which they’ll portray as a gift to the firearms industry and its CEOs (Giffords, in particular, has been doing a lot of targeted messaging about gun company CEOs ever since the CEO of United Healthcare was assassinated on a New York street last December). In fact, unnamed sources are already complaining to the press about what Trump’s proposed budget would mean. From Reuters:
If enacted, the cuts would force the agency to slash hundreds or more jobs, two of the sources said, in addition to the nearly 600 people who have already accepted the government’s deferred resignation option.
The agency employs about 5,300, about half of whom are special agents, according to public records. It has been unable to fill about 150 slots for special agents due to budget cuts in 2024, forcing it to cancel its incoming agent classes, two of the sources said.
Such a decrease would limit the ATF’s ability to assist federal, state and local law enforcement from analyzing key ballistic evidence that is often vital to solving homicides and other gun-related crimes.
It would also hamper its ability to help investigate cases involving bombs and arson, a niche area of expertise that many local law enforcement agencies lack, and it would impede it from conducting DNA analysis on shell casings to help solve crimes.
I’m skeptical about those specific complaints, but if Trump’s budget request is approbed it’s clear the ATF will have to make do with far less than what it currently receives. The roughly $1.2 billion budget proposed for FY 2026 is far less than what Trump proposed for the agency in the last year of his first term, when he sought a 19% increase in the ATF’s budget compared to FY2020. The additional $266.3 million meant 459 new positions; including 243 agents, so the $468 million cut proposed by Trump could result in about 800 fewer ATF staffers, though the 600 employees who have already accepted the early retirement offer from the administration likely means the number of dismissals will be substantially lower than that.
With well over a billion dollars at the ATF’s disposal under Trump’s budget there should be plenty of money to go after gun traffickers while leaving lawful gun owners free to exercise their Second Amendment rights without the heavy hand of the regulatory agency going after them for their pistol braces, selling a firearm from their private collection, or possessing legal firearms and gun parts. After the weaponization under Joe Biden’s watch the ATF is in serious need of reform, and the president’s budget request is a sign that the Trump administration is serious about reining in the agency’s abuses.
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