President Trump’s newly proposed budget for fiscal year 2026 is taking a chainsaw to the ATF’s funding, with a whopping $486 million on the chopping block.
Nearly half a billion dollars yanked from an agency that has been the bane of gun owners’ existence for decades.
This from thepatriotjournal.com.
According to the New York Times:
[T]he White House isn’t mincing words about why they’re cutting the ATF down to size. An anonymous senior official told ABC News that the agency’s ‘abusive regulatory decrees’ against law-abiding gun owners are precisely what put them in the budget crosshairs.
The official statement from the White House makes their intentions crystal clear:
[To halt] the ATF’s criminalizing of gun-owning Americans and instead, focusing on stopping illegal firearms traffickers and violent gang members.
The White House’s budget explicitly states:
[It] bolsters the Second Amendment by cutting funding for ATF offices that have criminalized law-abiding gun ownership through regulatory fiat.
The budget document spells it out:
The previous administration used the ATF to attack gun-owning Americans and undermine the Second Amendment [through measures like] requiring near-universal background checks [and] 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.
But while Trump is content to trim the fat, one congressman thinks it is time to serve up the whole hog. Rep. Eric Burlison (R-MO) has been on a mission to completely abolish the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, saying it’s time to “return power to the people.”
Rep. Burlison introduced H.R. 221 earlier this year with a straightforward purpose:
Abolish The ATF. It’s that simple. Eliminate this redundant agency that consistently violates Second Amendment rights.
Burlison has been relentless in his campaign, taking to social media to rally supporters. In an April post on X, he spoke pointedly:
The ATF is not your friend. It’s job is infringement. A free country doesn’t need a gun control enforcement agency. End it.
For those who might think eliminating an entire federal agency sounds extreme, Burlison has been quick to counter that narrative. Since launching his campaign in November 2024, he has consistently maintained there is “nothing radical” about abolishing the ATF. After all, why should American taxpayers fund an agency whose primary purpose seems to be infringing on the constitutional rights of those same taxpayers?
And Burlison will not stop with abolishing the ATF. He is simultaneously working to repeal the National Firearms Act (NFA), which would eliminate cumbersome processes currently involved in acquiring suppressors, short-barreled rifles, and other firearms and accessories.
Burlison stated bluntly in a social media post:
Gun control has always been about control, not safety.
The NFA is a prime example of this, and we’re working to take it down.
The impact on law-abiding gun owners would be immediate and substantial. No more waiting months for paperwork to clear just to purchase a suppressor to protect your hearing while shooting. No more arbitrary classifications that can turn a law-abiding citizen into a felon overnight because of a measurement difference of a quarter-inch on a firearm. No more living in fear that today’s legal firearm accessory could be tomorrow’s felony contraband because some unelected bureaucrat decided to reinterpret a regulation.
For decades, the ATF has gradually expanded its authority through regulatory interpretation rather than actual legislation. Both Trump’s budget and Burlison’s bill represent the most serious challenges to this administrative overreach in generations.
Let us keep in mind the vision of our Founding Fathers—a nation where the right to keep and bear arms “shall not be infringed.”
