Under Trump, Gun Agency Remains Rudderless and Leaderless

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — a small government agency tasked with the titanic challenge of stemming the spread of illegal guns — has long been regarded as the spurned stepchild of federal law enforcement.

It is fast becoming an orphan.

The bureau, responsible for enforcing gun laws and regulating firearms dealers, enjoyed a brief but consequential revival during the Biden administration. It led a four-year push to expand background checks on buyers, crack down on untraceable homemade weapons known as “ghost guns” and curtail the use of devices that convert standard weapons into machine guns.

That ended when President Trump took office. Since then, the A.T.F., a division of the Justice Department, has been ravaged by the departure of key career personnel, the diversion of dozens of agents from core duties to immigration enforcement and from what amounts to a campaign of indifference — leaving it rudderless, leaderless and demoralized.

On Wednesday morning, the A.T.F.’s roughly 10,000 employees were handed off from one distracted caretaker, the F.B.I. director Kash Patel, and dumped on the bureaucratic doorstep of the Army secretary. The secretary, Daniel Driscoll, had only been told he was being saddled with the assignment a few days before, according to people familiar with the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to publicly discuss the matter.

The highly unusual move placed a civilian military leader in charge of a domestic law enforcement entity for the first time in memory, and critics of the administration were quick to discern sinister motives.

The truth was less menacing, if no less damning for an agency Republicans have long sought to handcuff and marginalize: Mr. Patel was too busy doing his day job, and Mr. Driscoll had been confirmed by the Senate, a prerequisite for taking over.

The fact that Mr. Driscoll, a close friend of Vice President JD Vance, has no relevant experience did not deter the White House from tapping him for the job. (Mr. Driscoll gained proficiency with firearms as a cavalry scout with the Army’s 10th Mountain Division in Iraq.)

“We already witnessed four years of a Trump administration hellbent on underfunding and undermining the critical role of A.T.F.,” said T. Christian Heyne, head of policy at Brady, a gun violence prevention organization.

“The appointment of another acting director — one that is already tasked with overseeing over a million U.S. soldiers — shows a total disregard for public safety and American lives,” he added.

It is not clear why, or when, the White House decided to remove and replace Mr. Patel. But administration officials seem to have decided relatively early on, right after his February swearing-in, that Mr. Patel’s time there would be short, and settled on Mr. Driscoll as his successor, officials said — although no one appears to have informed him.

Mr. Patel, for his part, seemed eager to offload the responsibility, even though he told friends in recent weeks that he was most likely to serve for the foreseeable future, simply because he could not find an offramp.

To say the A.T.F. was not his top priority is an understatement. Mr. Patel is known to have visited A.T.F. headquarters only once, stayed for a few hours and has not been back since, although his top deputy, Dan Bongino, visited on several occasions.

It is not clear how much time, if any, Mr. Driscoll plans to spend there. He is often abroad and was traveling in Germany on Wednesday when his appointment became public.

Leadership of the bureau has been virtually nonexistent — even the top-ranking career official on site, Marvin Richardson, is being forced out — and morale has plummeted at headquarters, current and former employees said.

Despite this uncertainty, most of the bureau’s staff of investigators are doing their jobs with minimal disruption, and have played significant roles in major drug and crime busts heralded by the Trump administration.

Many of the bureau’s frontline employees are, in fact, conservatives who supported Mr. Trump and embrace his law-and-order message. And to the extent that Trump administration officials have debated A.T.F.’s future, it has been with an eye toward cutting back its regulatory functions, while bolstering its role in drug cases and immigration.

Dozens of agents have been diverted to beef up the federal law enforcement presence at immigration raids. Mr. Patel, speaking on an internal conference call recently, floated the idea of reassigning about 1,000 of A.T.F.’s most experienced agents to the F.B.I. — but later settled on the detailing of about 125, many to the southern border, according to officials.

A bigger Justice Department reorganization plan, recently drafted by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche working closely with the White House, proposed merging the A.T.F. with the Drug Enforcement Administration.

The proposal was greeted with wary optimism inside the A.T.F.: It might provide greater long-term stability for both organizations, which collaborate often. But it would require congressional approval, and could take years to be implemented.

There are some signs that the Trump administration would like to find a permanent, Senate-appointed leader.

Over the past two months Trump appointees have quietly interviewed several candidates to be the permanent director, including Michael D. Faucette, a prominent gun rights lawyer. But none have panned out. One applicant withdrew from consideration when he learned the salary, less than $250,000 a year, according to people familiar with the situation.

The paradox of A.T.F. is that it draws intense scrutiny during bursts of regulatory activity under Democratic presidents — both as a target and a fund-raising magnet for the Second Amendment movement — then recedes into obscurity when Republicans return to reverse with a few pen strokes what their predecessors toiled over years to enact.

Earlier this week, Attorney General Pam Bondi rolled back a range of Biden-era gun control measures, including a crackdown on federally licensed gun dealers who falsify business records and skip customer background checks.

She also directed A.T.F. to review two other major policies enacted under the Biden administration, with an eye toward scrapping both. One is a ban on so-called pistol braces used to convert handguns into rifle-like weapons, and the second is a rule requiring background checks on private gun sales.

That does not mean the administration will not become more aggressive. Ms. Bondi has also announced her intention to convene a task force to expand gun rights and has repurposed the department’s civil rights division to open investigations into the purported infringement of Second Amendment rights by localities that seek to regulate firearms to confront violent crime.

But, for now, the A.T.F. appears to be an afterthought rather than a focal point.

One person who foretold the current scenario was Steven M. Dettelbach, who stepped down as the bureau’s director in December after pushing through some of the most significant gun control measures in decades.

“What I am concerned about is that is that people will take their eye off the ball, that they’ll either get complacent or political,” he said in an interview just before he left.

“That will result in more people getting killed.”