President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency is turning its destructive sights on yet another federal agency: the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). According to NBC News, DOGE has sent staff to the ATF “with the goal of revising or eliminating dozens of rules and gun restrictions” and its “initial goal is to change as many as 47 regulations,” in an apparent reference to Trump’s standing as the 47th American president. However flimsy the motivation, the result is the same: an America with even fewer responsible gun regulations.
Trump’s ATF has also canned former President Joe Biden’s zero tolerance policy for gun dealers who have committed violations such as selling a gun without a background check.
Chad Gilmartin, a spokesman for the Justice Department, which oversees ATF, said in a statement: “As Attorney General Bondi has made clear, ATF is working hard to reduce regulatory red tape that burdens lawful gun owners and to ensure agents are doing real police work hunting down criminals and gang members — not knocking on the doors of lawful gun owners in the middle of the night.”
The Washington Post, which first reported this new DOGE initiative, points out that ATF has hundreds of regulations and that revisions “could include changing the responsibilities of certain ATF positions, updating what types of firearms can be imported, and making licensing fees refundable.”
One striking detail in the Post’s reporting, based on people with knowledge of DOGE’s efforts, is that DOGE is looking to dramatically shorten the form that most gun buyers are required to fill out when purchasing a weapon “from the current seven pages to as few as three pages.” Law enforcement uses the form to trace guns during a criminal investigation or to help determine if gun sellers are complying with the law. That shortening has the potential to substantively change the questionnaire:
Some of the questions to determine if a potential buyer is legally allowed to own a firearm may be condensed into one large “yes” or “no” question. For example, separate questions ask people to answer if they have been committed to a mental institution, have been dishonorably discharged from the military or are an unlawful user of drugs. These and others could be combined into one question under the potential changes, two people familiar with them said. The question asking if the potential buyer is a felon would remain a stand-alone question.
In short, streamlining the form could potentially eliminate information that the federal agency regulating guns would want to know about buyers.
This all comes as the Justice Department is aiming to scrap two-thirds of the ATF’s inspectors, who monitor federally licensed gun dealers. Those inspectors help ensure compliance with regulations which, according to The New York Times, are “intended to keep guns away from traffickers, straw purchasers, criminals and those found to have severe mental illness.” Trump’s ATF has also canned former President Joe Biden’s zero tolerance policy for gun dealers who have committed violations such as selling a gun without a background check. And Trump has recently permitted the sale of previously banned “forced-reset triggers,” which convert semiautomatic rifles into machine guns, in a maneuver so extreme that it even rankled Trump’s Second Amendment-loving ATF chief counsel. So while we don’t know exactly what kind of policy revisions DOGE will pursue in the name of “efficiency,” it’s not unreasonable to predict that they will make it all the easier for guns to flow throughout this country with even less regulatory scrutiny. In a country awash in more guns than people, this is that last thing the country needs.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for MS NOW. Previously, he worked at Vox, HuffPost and Politico, and he has also been published in, among other places, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Nation, and The Intercept. You can sign up for his free politics newsletter by clicking the link at the top of this bio. 
