President Donald Trump’s February 24 appointment of FBI Director Kash Patel to also 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.
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 special agent who held various supervisory roles within the agency 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. Addressing the auditorium in Knoxville, Tennessee, Patel criticized the ATF as an arm of the government moving to “wipe out” people’s Second Amendment rights.
Patel’s appointment came just days after Trump’s newly installed attorney general, Pam Bondi, fired the ATF’s longtime general counsel. On February 7, Trump ordered a Justice Department review of all gun-related policies enacted over the past four years, a move widely 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 likely fall to Patel.
A spokesperson for the ATF said the agency could not immediately respond to a request for comment, but that it planned to release a statement concerning Patel’s appointment once he had finished transitioning into the role.
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.
The post is meant to be temporary — Patel’s appointment was not confirmed by Congress, and Trump could still nominate a permanent director who would be subject to the traditional confirmation process. But historically, 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 Joe Biden withdrew his first nominee for ATF director, David Chipman, after outrage from Republicans over Chipman’s work for gun reform groups.
Chipman, a former ATF special agent, told The Trace that the absence of a confirmed director weakens the agency’s ability to advocate for itself in Congress and at the White House. He said choosing Patel — a political appointee already in charge of another federal agency — showed the Trump administration is more interested in tightening its grip over federal law enforcement than bolstering the agency’s leadership. “They have no interest in ATF actually carrying out its mission,” he said. “The goal it seems is to let the agency die on the vine.”
Chipman and other former ATF officials said Patel’s appointment also 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.
A merger would require an act of Congress and force the FBI or another agency to take over the ATF’s regulatory functions in addition to its crimefighting duties. The ATF conducts compliance inspections at federally licensed firearm and explosives dealers and manages a national database used by thousands of state and local law enforcement agencies to trace the ownership history of guns used in crimes.
In a 2015 report, the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank, recommended that the FBI take over the ATF, citing the latter agency’s persistent budget and staffing shortages.
Arkadi Gerney, one of the report’s co-authors, said Patel’s appointment is not what he and his colleagues envisioned when they made their recommendation. He said the FBI is no longer the politically neutral organization it was in 2015, and he worries that Trump would only use a merger as a means of consolidating power. (Gerney serves in an unpaid role on an advisory board for The Trace. You can read our editorial independence policy here.)
Patel has long been critical of the Justice Department. In his 2023 book “Government Gangsters,” he called FBI and Justice Department leaders “a threat to the people” and said they needed to be rooted out and prosecuted. He has also vowed to investigate journalists who were seen to have reported negatively on the previous Trump administration.
“Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections,” Patel told former Trump adviser Steve Bannon on a podcast in 2023. “Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.”
Gerney pointed to these comments as reason for skepticism about the administration’s motivations in any would-be merger. “Good ideas become bad ideas when the wrong people get involved,” Gerney said.
Scot Thomasson, a former ATF division chief, said joining the ATF and FBI would be disastrous, bogging the ATF down in a thicket of bureaucracy. At the same time, he didn’t see the agencies’ shared leadership as a step toward consolidation. He said Patel could shift resources from the FBI to beef up the ATF’s law enforcement arm, which has historically lacked sufficient funding.
“I actually think Patel is the best person to lead the ATF right now,” Thomasson said. “If he really wants to rightsize this thing, I think he has a wonderful opportunity. But we’ll have to wait and see.”
Gun groups have cheered Patel’s appointment. The National Shooting Sports Foundation, the gun industry’s trade group, said in a press release that Patel’s leadership “will return the bureau to its proper role as a law enforcement agency laser focused on combatting violent crime” and a “non-partisan regulator” of the gun industry.
Neither Patel nor Trump have publicly addressed Patel’s appointment or explained why he’s taking on a dual role.
Kris Brown, president of the gun violence prevention group Brady, said the administration’s silence has left hers and other organizations uncertain of what to expect from Patel, though she had no confidence that the agency would be effective under his leadership.
“They’re not making it clear what the endgame is,” she said, “which makes it difficult for organizations like ours to imagine anything other than the worst-case scenario.”
