Biden wants billion dollar boost to ATF budget

A $1.7-billion boost, to be precise.

Joe Biden may have failed in his mission to install a gun control activist as head of the ATF, but that isn’t stopping the White House from moving forward with its plan to weaponize the agency and turn into what amounts to a gun control group with law enforcement powers.

In his newly proposed budget, Biden is calling for more than a billion dollars in new funding for the ATF (and yes, I did double check just to make sure he wasn’t proposing giving that money to the American Federation of Teachers instead); a 13% increase over its current funding levels. In a statement, the White House press office made it clear that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, & Explosives is still the central component of his gun control efforts.

President Biden has made more progress on executive actions to reduce gun violence than any other President during their first year in office. Implementing the President’s comprehensive strategy to reduce gun crime, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is pursuing rulemaking to rein in the proliferation of “ghost guns” – unserialized, privately-made firearms that are increasingly being recovered at crime scenes and can be difficult to trace.