This month’s news that Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll had taken over as acting director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives was the latest in a string of unexpected developments at the agency. The turmoil has caused an exodus of senior-level employees and left remaining staff feeling discouraged and destabilized, current and former officials told The Trace.
Four assistant directors and the agency’s chief technology officer have left or announced plans to leave the agency in the past six months, according to the officials and a review of LinkedIn posts. At least two of these officials accepted deferred resignations offered in January by the Trump administration as part of an aggressive push to cull the federal workforce. More senior-level employees are expected to accept a second resignation offer issued more recently, the officials said.
“Everybody I’ve talked with is just waiting for the shoe to drop and hear that they’re being cut or that the agency is being downsized,” said one senior official who, like other current employees, spoke with The Trace on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. “I’ve never seen a work environment like this. Morale is abysmal.”
Driscoll replaces FBI Director Kash Patel, whom the Trump administration tapped to lead the ATF in February. Both men were asked to carry out leadership duties at the ATF while simultaneously working full-time jobs at other, larger agencies. According to The Washington Post, Patel was rarely seen in the ATF’s headquarters and seldom corresponded with top brass before being relieved of his position.
The ATF and the FBI declined to comment. Driscoll did not respond to multiple calls.
Immediately following Driscoll’s appointment, the Trump administration told the agency’s second-in-command, Deputy Director Marvin Richardson, to retire or be fired, according to Reuters. Richardson chose to resign, ending a 35-year career. (At 62, Richardson was five years past mandatory retirement age for ATF agents, but he had been granted a series of extensions routinely offered to senior officials, his former colleagues said.)
On April 18, Executive Assistant Director Alphonso Hughes, one of the two most senior employees behind Richardson, followed his boss out. The ATF has since removed Hughes’s portrait from its website’s leadership page. Executive Assistant Director Robert Cekada, a 20-year veteran of the agency, has stepped into the deputy director post and is expected to lead the agency’s day-to-day operations.
Gun blogs have reported that Megan Bennett, assistant director of the Office of Enforcement Programs and Services, had been fired, but when reached for comment on April 22, she confirmed she was still employed by the agency with no immediate plans to retire.
The Senate confirmed Driscoll to run the Army in March. Before that, he served as an adviser to Vice President JD Vance, with whom he attended law school, and placed sixth in a crowded Republican primary election for a North Carolina House seat in 2020.
The acting directorship is meant to be temporary — neither Patel’s nor Driscoll’s appointments were confirmed by Congress, and by law no leader can hold the interim position for more than 120 days. Trump could still nominate a permanent director who would be subject to the traditional confirmation process. But historically, political gridlock has made permanent directors 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.
Daryl McCormick, a former special agent in charge of the ATF’s Columbus, Ohio, field division who retired in February, said the agency often struggles to obtain resources under interim leadership. Senate-confirmed directors can work full time to advocate on the agency’s behalf with the president and Congress, he said, and have the political backing to gather bipartisan support.
“Agents on the ground still know what to do, and they’re still out there doing it,” McCormick said. “But the director sets the conditions under which we work. Having a Senate-confirmed director makes an incredible difference.”
Driscoll has not yet spoken publicly about his plans for the ATF, but he toured agency headquarters on April 15 and met with staff. A current employee familiar with that meeting said Driscoll assured senior officials that he would support their work and defer to them on most matters, and that he left a far better impression than Patel.
A post from the ATF’s X account detailing the visit said Driscoll had outlined “key priorities, pledging to lead the ATF in combating gun violence and investigating explosives and arson.” Three days later, Driscoll joined Deputy Director Cekada during the arrest of a suspect charged with setting fire to a Tesla dealership in Kansas City.
Mark Jones, a former ATF special agent who held various supervisory roles within the agency before retiring in 2011, said the leadership changes seemed part of a Trump administration strategy to render the ATF “rudderless.” Republicans often vilify the ATF because of its position as the gun industry’s regulator, and some have proposed abolishing the agency entirely, though such a move would require congressional approval.
“Is there a better way to make sure that the agency is ineffective than to put someone in charge who has no background in either law enforcement or industry regulation and is working on a part-time basis?” Jones said.
Jones and other former employees cited a March Justice Department memo proposing to merge the ATF and Drug Enforcement Administration as a potential signal of the White House’s intentions. They said Driscoll may serve as a placeholder leader until the Trump administration can gather the necessary congressional support for combining the two agencies.
“The Army secretary is basically a logistics guy,” said Scot Thomasson, former chief of the ATF’s Firearms Operations Division, who retired in 2012. “If the whole intent is to merge ATF with DEA, it could make sense to have someone with that sort of logistics expertise at the helm to oversee the transition.”
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Violence prevention researchers, politicians, and law enforcement officials have long floated agency mergers as a way to depoliticize the ATF. The agency has historically suffered budget and staffing shortages as a result of political opposition to its enforcement of federal firearms laws opposed by gun rights supporters.
Current and former officials said combining the ATF and DEA would make more sense than previous proposals to merge the agency with the FBI, since the ATF and the DEA frequently collaborate on criminal investigations and both serve regulatory functions.
So far, the leadership upheaval and sinking morale have not significantly hampered the agency’s operations on the ground, current and recently retired employees said. More consequential have been Justice Department directives pulling ATF agents onto immigration task forces and eliminating certain Biden-era enforcement efforts.
The ATF announced April 7 that it was ending its zero-tolerance policy for gun dealers, a Biden administration measure requiring stricter penalties when dealers commit serious violations of federal gun laws. Gun industry interest groups and many ATF agents had argued that the policy unfairly targeted dealers who posed little threat to public safety.
Violence prevention advocates saw the policy reversal as a sign that the ATF will pare back its efforts to inspect gun dealers under the new administration, regardless of leadership. After Trump’s inauguration, the agency stopped posting gun store inspection results on its website every month — a transparency practice it had maintained since October 2021.
