Pop quiz: which is a larger force, federal bureaucrats armed with weapons and the power to arrest citizens, or the US Marine Corps?
You already know the answer, don’t you? When you are talking about the federal government, the most absurd answer is usually the correct one.
A report issued last year by the watchdog group Open The Books, “The Militarization of The U.S. Executive Agencies,” found that more than 200,000 federal bureaucrats now have been granted the authority to carry guns and make arrests – more than the 186,000 Americans serving in the U.S. Marine Corps. “One hundred three executive agencies outside of the Department of Defense spent $2.7 billion on guns, ammunition, and military-style equipment between fiscal years 2006 and 2019 (inflation adjusted),” notes the report. “Nearly $1 billion ($944.9 million) was spent between fiscal years 2015 and 2019 alone.”
Let that sink in for a moment. The Marine Corps is our rapid response team and our shock troops whose job it is to defend the country against enemies of the United States. We rely on them to defend US territory abroad such as embassies, but also to bear the brunt of enemy action and do some of the dirtiest jobs in war. And, of course, not all of those marines are frontline troops, because support personnel have to be there to make the organization work. The number in infantry battalions is far, far fewer.
So in reality the number of federal bureaucrats who are empowered to carry weapons and arrest you and me outnumbers frontline Marines by a huge margin. That is absolutely shocking when you think about it, because most law enforcement is actually done by local police forces. The fed’s role in law enforcement is relatively small.
The watchdog reports that the Department of Health and Human Services has 1,300 guns including one shotgun, five submachine guns, and 189 automatic firearms. NASA has its own fully outfitted SWAT team, with all the attendant weaponry, including armored vehicles, submachine guns, and breeching shotguns. The Environmental Protection Agency has purchased drones, GPS trackers, radar equipment, and night vision goggles, in addition to stockpiling firearms.
A 2018 Government Accountability Office report noted that the IRS had 4,487 guns and 5,062,006 rounds of ammunition in inventory at the end of 2017 – before the enforcement funding boost this year. The IRS did not respond to requests for information, though the IRS’ Criminal Investigation division does put out an annual report detailing basic information such as how many warrants the agency is executing in a given year.
Yet more than a hundred executive agencies have armed investigators, and there doesn’t appear to be any independent authority actively monitoring or tracking the use of force across the federal government.
Obviously some of the increased militarization of the domestic agencies of the federal government is a response to the dangers of terrorism, but that doesn’t explain why so many agencies are becoming armed and dangerous. When the IRS and the Department of Human services start arming up dramatically you have to wonder what is going on. The IRS can obviously call on the FBI and the Marshal’s service for law enforcement help, and DHS needing automatic weapons? Explain that one.
By and large, the arming of the federal bureaucracy is a relatively recent phenomenon: Some 74,500 federal agents had firearm authority in 1996, a number that has nearly tripled since then. Some of the increase is due to agencies taking responsibility for the security of their own buildings. The Department of Veterans Affairs, for example, did not have a police force in 1995, but by 2018 it had nearly 4,000 armed officers, mostly dedicated to guarding the agency’s hospitals and other medical sites.
“We can all understand the dangerous world out there,” said Adam Andrzejewski, the CEO of Open The Books – and thus, he said, the need for some heavy weaponry in the Departments of Homeland Security and Justice. “But some of these other agencies, like Health and Human Services, they’ve got machine guns?”
Andrzejewski said that when he asked HHS about its arsenal, the agency spoke only in general terms about the dangers employees faced. It did not detail an increase in threats or provide specific examples of cases where such weapons would be required.
Even agencies you would never think of are armed and ready. Would you ever have guessed that the Environmental Protection Agency would send armed agents to raid and inspect an auto shop that converts street cars into racing vehicles on the pretext that emission standards might be violated? If not, you would be wrong.
Still, federal agencies doing their own criminal investigations raises important constitutional and civil rights questions that have never really been addressed. Last year, the Environmental Protection Agency raided a number of small auto shops across the country for allegedly selling equipment that helped car owners circumvent emissions regulations. The auto shop owners say that the emissions equipment they were installing was part of the process of turning street legal cars into vehicles that are solely dedicated to being used on racetracks – an activity that’s not necessarily illegal.
“It was 12 armed federal agents, and they had little EPA badges on and everything,” John Lund, the owner of Lund Racing in West Chester, Pennsylvania, told the Washington Examiner. “They had a search warrant for conspiracy to sell defeat devices. They basically went around the building, and they did forensics — physical forensics, digital forensics on the laptops, and we were compliant.
The arming of the federal government is extremely worrisome. The founders feared precisely this sort of thing and put in safeguards to prevent the militarization of the federal government against Americans. Imagine how George Washington or James Madison would have reacted if they had heard President Biden threaten average Americans concerned about protecting their freedom with the use of F-15s. It would have blown them away.
George W Bush got the ball rolling with the Patriot Act, so this is not simply a partisan issue. I was among the conservatives who scoffed at critics of the growing security state, naively believing that modern-day threats required modern-day solutions, including increased vigilance.
I was very wrong. We handed the Left a tool that they are using against US citizens, and it gets worse every day. A majority of Americans now see the FBI as a politically captured Secret Police that works against the president’s adversaries. I am afraid they are right.
Should Republicans retake the Congress one of the first tasks they should take up is reversing this trend. No matter who is in power, having a federal government armed to the teeth with guns pointed inward at Americans is a danger too great to allow.
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