President Trump’s appointment of FBI Director Kash Patel to serve as acting chief of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has stirred fears among former ATF officials and gun violence prevention advocates about a dramatic shakeup at the nation’s top gun regulator, The Trace reports. Patel will lead a workforce of more than 5,000 ATF employees charged with investigating violent gun crime and regulating the country’s sprawling firearms industry. “It’s pretty demoralizing,” said Mark Jones, a former ATF agent who held various supervisory roles before retiring in 2011. “This guy doesn’t like the ATF and doesn’t believe in firearms regulation. I just see him coming in with a wrecking ball.” Patel, a partisan firebrand and former federal prosecutor, has cozied up to the most extreme flank of the gun rights movement. In August, he spoke at the inaugural summit of Gun Owners of America, a group that bills itself as a more hardline alternative to the National Rifle Association and has advocated abolishing the ATF. Patel criticized the ATF as an arm of the government moving to “wipe out” people’s Second Amendment rights.
Patel’s appointment came after Trump’s Attorney General Pam Bondi fired the ATF’s longtime general counsel. Trump has ordered a Justice Department review of all gun-related policies enacted over the past four years, a move seen as a step toward dismantling Biden-era gun reforms. As the ATF is part of the Justice Department and implemented many of those policies, much of that review will fall to Patel. Patel takes over for Marvin Richardson, who assumed the acting director position after the resignation of the agency’s last Senate-confirmed leader, Steven Dettelbach, in January. Trump could still nominate a permanent director who would be subject to the traditional confirmation process. Political gridlock has made permanent directorship the exception rather than the rule at the ATF. The agency has had just two Senate-confirmed leaders since Congress started requiring Senate sign-off in 2006. President Biden withdrew his first nominee, David Chipman, after outrage from Republicans over Chipman’s work for gun reform groups. Chipman, a former ATF agent, said the absence of a confirmed director weakens the agency’s ability to advocate for itself in Congress and at the White House. He said the Trump administration has no interest in ATF actually carrying out its mission,” he said. “The goal it seems raises the specter of an eventual merger between the agency and the FBI — an idea that has circulated for years among Democrats and Republicans as a way to depoliticize the ATF and reign in perceived overreach.