The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms is undergoing a modernization effort that its new director believes will strike the right balance between its – seemingly disparate — major mission areas.
Robert Cekada, who has been at the helm of the ATF since April 30, said he wants to reduce burdensome regulations, particularly around legal access to firearms, while at the same time ensuring his agents are able to prevent violent crimes.
The day before Cekada was officially sworn in, ATF released a list of 34 regulations intended to modernize how the agency works, reduce the regulatory and paperwork burden on consumers and industry and loosen restrictions on features like stabilizing braces and bump stocks.
In a recent interview with Federal News Network’s Terry Gerton, he said succeeding at those goals isn’t just pragmatic for the agency, it’s an existential issue.
ATF covers an umbrella of investigative and regulatory areas, from licensing firearms and explosives manufacturers to combatting international gun trafficking and setting up stings for straw purchases. The agency also investigates about 3,500 arson and explosives cases every year – an area Cekada said they have unique expertise in.
“From my perspective, we’re the only federal agency that works for the Department of Justice whose core mission is focused on violent crime,” he said. “And that’s violent crime committed by folks who illegally use firearms, folks that are gang members, prohibited persons, cartel members and illegal aliens.”
Cekada said he’s trying to lead the agency out of a dark period that he says almost brought an end to it altogether.
“We’ve carried that balance out for as long as ATF has been around, but I’ll be frank, the last series of regulations under the last administration put ATF at great harm. It was not received well by the public, it was not received well by, frankly, both chambers of the House and Senate, so much so that ATF’s budget was threatened to be cut by almost $400 million in 2025,” he said.
A cut that deep would’ve resulted in a reduction in force of 1,400 employees. At that point, Cekada said, the agency would’ve been unable to fulfill its missions and it would’ve been a waste of taxpayer money to keep it operating at all.
And it wasn’t just members of Congress who didn’t approve of the way the agency was operating. Cekada said that the agency received pushback from the firearms industry as well as the public.
“That caused significant harm in the relationships that we have amongst the community and frankly, even law enforcement — those law enforcement agencies that we’ve had probably the best relationships because we are on the ground working violent crime cases with our state and local partners — they were getting the negative side of, ‘Oh, you’re working with ATF,’” he said. “That was causing them quite a bit of headache from their communities who felt that ATF was an agency that was, frankly, not doing their job. They were taking the easy road and holding good American people accountable for what the criminals were actually doing.”
Cekada said he’s also changing ATF’s relationship with the firearms industry, from perhaps adversarial to more collaborative.
“Very often we get tips from the members of the industry daily about people that are involved in firearms trafficking, in particular, those businesses that have been around for a long time and do things all above board,” he said. “They want to make sure that the industry around them is doing things the right way too. They’ve made their family businesses off of this and don’t want to see the industry get a bad reputation as a result of someone not following the rules.
He said the agency currently has about 670 industry operations investigators who regulate and oversee federal firearms and explosives licensees.
ATF also has just under 2,400 agents, who handle investigations and on-the-ground work, often working with other agencies as part of task forces.
“There is an overt discussion of moving thousands of agents to the FBI, three months later over to DEA. And then today we’re still here. Why? We stayed focused on violent crime. We stayed focused on violent crime and we worked, integrated with the Homeland Security Task Force to do what we do best and stay focused on those areas that are [where] we make the biggest impact around the country,” Cekada said.
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