Attorney General Pam Bondi is facing bipartisan backlash over a reported plan to merge the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives with the Drug Enforcement Administration.
Liberals have opposed the Trump administration’s unilateral moves to dismantle, downsize, rearrange and repurpose congressionally authorized agencies since the president took office — and the response to the planned ATF-DEA merger has been no different. The plan has particularly alarmed liberals, like the president of Everytown for Gun Safety, who are concerned about the government’s ability to enforce gun laws if Trump follows through with reported plans to cut hundreds of investigators.
A Reuters report from mid-May laid out some of the challenges posed by the plan:
A merger of the ATF and DEA would represent one of the biggest shakeups of the Justice Department since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. It would also pose a challenging task for the Justice Department to seamlessly try to combine the DEA’s complex role of regulating pharmacies, doctors and drug manufacturers, and the ATF’s responsibility for regulating the firearms industry.
At a hearing earlier this week, Democratic Rep. Rosa DeLauro grilled Bondi over the planned cuts as the two debated the merits of the merger. DeLauro questioned how either agency could fulfill its duties better than it does now if the Trump administration is proposing cuts to both their budgets. Bondi argued the merger was being undertaken in the name of efficiency. “Everyone knows, everyone sitting up here knows guns and drugs go together,” she argued.
But a number of large, conservative gun groups aren’t too keen on the proposal either. During her exchange with DeLauro, Bondi claimed “ATF agents will not be knocking on the doors of legal gun owners in the middle of the night asking them about their guns.” That may have been a nod to the pro-gun groups that sent Bondi a letter expressing their opposition to the plan over concerns it would “create a super-entity of gun control enforcers, and empower future administrations to target the Second Amendment community in unprecedented ways.”
“That does not align with President Trump’s policy agenda,” the groups wrote, “and it certainly is not what the President was elected with the help of gun owners to accomplish.” The Second Amendment Foundation, a conservative gun advocacy group, coordinated the letter and sent it to Bondi in early June. The group reshared the letter on its X account after Bondi’s testimony and urged her to reconsider the merger.
It’s rare to see liberals like DeLauro, a supporter of comprehensive gun safety legislation, and Trump-friendly gun advocacy groups finding common ground — even if their reasons for opposing the administration’s plan certainly differ. But fundamentally, this eyebrow-raising move is generating clear bipartisan unease about what it might portend for the future.
