Many federal agencies are bracing for the Trump era — but few are likely to face the powerful backlash that awaits the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which pursued an aggressive gun control agenda under President Biden.
The A.T.F., under its Biden-appointed director, Steven M. Dettelbach, has been more proactive on gun control than at any time in its recent history. It has pushed through rules to curb the proliferation of the untraceable homemade firearms known as ghost guns, clamped down on devices that make firearms deadlier and regulated unlicensed firearms sellers who operate at gun shows or online.
That earned praise from gun control groups and drew the enmity of Republicans, including President-elect Donald J. Trump. He is almost certain to pick a proponent of gun rights as director or simply leave the job vacant, as previous presidents have done, leaving the small and embattled bureau rudderless and vulnerable.
But the biggest threat, in the view of Mr. Dettelbach, may come from the Republican-controlled Congress, which is threatening to cut the budget for the federal agency. Its core function is fundamentally apolitical, joining with local enforcement to trace weapons used in crimes and dismantle trafficking rings by providing intelligence and technical assistance.
“People who don’t think that law enforcement, including A.T.F., has anything to do with driving down violent crime are just wrong — it didn’t happen by accident,” said Mr. Dettelbach, sitting in his sprawling, slightly disheveled office at the bureau’s Washington headquarters this month.
“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, or some combination of those things,” said Mr. Dettelbach, a former U.S. attorney in Ohio, whose low-key, Midwestern style belies his willingness to take actions that have elicited political attacks and legal challenges.
“That will result in more people getting killed.”
The A.T.F. faces a deeply uncertain future, and there is little doubt that difficult times lie ahead — perhaps in the form of even deeper funding cuts aimed at punishing the agency for the flurry of regulatory actions he undertook.
Even before the election, congressional Republicans already succeeded in cutting the bureau’s budget. In the 2024 budget year, they inserted a $47 million cut to its modest $1.6 billion annual budget, at a time when other federal agencies were seeing increases to keep pace with inflation.
During the campaign, Mr. Trump repeatedly promised to immediately fire Mr. Dettelbach and to quickly reverse many of the Biden administration’s most important changes. In the interview, Mr. Dettelbach said he planned to quit before Mr. Trump took office.
Mr. Trump, in speeches, has singled out a rule that increased regulation of so-called stabilizing braces that make it easier to use a pistol as a long gun that is easier to aim. He has also pointed to Mr. Dettelbach’s effort to expand background checks on weapons sold at gun shows, to include private kitchen-table gun sales and online firearms marketplaces.
“Under a Trump administration all of those Biden disasters get ripped up and torn up during my first week, but maybe my first day in office,” Mr. Trump told a gathering of gun rights activists during the campaign.
That Mr. Dettelbach has become a favored target of the right is unsurprising. But at the time of his selection in 2022, many on the left viewed him as something of a middling pick — after President Biden’s first choice, David Chipman, a fierce gun control activist, foundered.
Mr. Dettelbach’s aggressive approach eventually earned him the support of officials in liberal states who have worked closely with A.T.F., and are now bracing for four years of policy reversals and the possibility of even deeper budget cuts.
“We’re going from having a real partnership with somebody like Steve Dettelbach, who is accessible and believes in safe communities, to a situation where the new director, in all likelihood, isn’t as concerned about the ravages of gun violence,” said Keith Ellison, the Democratic attorney general of Minnesota.
“I mean, nobody’s trying to take away your guns, that’s been the biggest lie ever,” he added, referring to a common refrain by Mr. Trump on the campaign trail. “But we need a partner who is doing everything they can to stop mass shootings, individual shootings, suicides.”
The botched 1993 raid in Waco, Texas, coupled with the bungled gun trafficking investigation during the Obama administration known as Operation Fast and Furious, have made the bureau a scapegoat — and fund-raising magnet — on the right. Many of its 2,600 agents and 700 inspectors are politically conservative gun owners themselves hostile to what they perceive as Mr. Dettelbach’s liberal agenda, according to interviews with the bureau’s rank-and-file over the past year.
But even career officials sympathetic to Mr. Trump are concerned that the anticipated about-face could adversely affect the bureau’s core functions of interdicting gun trafficking, processing gun and ballistics traces and offering assistance to local law enforcement.
One other person who seems to have privately voiced some of those concerns is Pam Bondi, Mr. Trump’s choice to run the Justice Department. Ms. Bondi, who worked with the A.T.F. as Florida’s attorney general, has expressed a preference for a relatively nonideological replacement for Mr. Dettelbach to fulfill the campaign’s law-and-order promises, according to two people familiar with the situation who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Transition officials have told gun rights groups that they do not expect Mr. Trump to pick an A.T.F. director before next spring, but caution that he is just as likely to tap somebody on impulse, at any moment, without consulting his transition team.
Those said to be under consideration are: Blake Masters, a far-right conservative in Arizona who is close to the financier Peter Thiel and who mounted a failed bid for a House seat; Peter J. Forcelli, a former bureau official who wrote a book on the “Fast and Furious” scandal; Larry Keane, the head of the gun manufacturers’ trade association; and several current and former top A.T.F. officials, including Robert Cekada, Daniel Board and Rick Dressler.
Mr. Dettelbach, for his part, said he would have wanted to remain in his job if Vice President Kamala Harris had been elected.
He has spent his final days visiting field offices around the country, where he has emphasized the advances law enforcement made under his leadership: expansion of the bureau’s crime gun intelligence centers, increasing the reach of A.T.F.’s national ballistics database, slowing the proliferation of deadly and illegal gun accessories known as Glock “switches” and streamlining the inspection process of federally licensed dealers.
Asked if he was alarmed that many of his would-be successors had publicly vowed to reverse every policy action he took, Mr. Dettelbach offered a somewhat surprising answer: He was more concerned that Mr. Trump would appoint no one at all, creating a leadership void at the bureau akin to the seven-year stretch of interim directors that preceded his own appointment.
“I believe very strongly that the president needs to appoint a permanent director,” he said. “Republicans control everything at the moment, and their inclination has been to cut. I think having a permanent director gives A.T.F. a stronger voice in everything related to the budget, and other things that come up.”
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