By Adam Andrzejewski
For at least a decade, Americans have grown increasingly cynical about what used to be some of our nation’s sacred institutions — from disparate outcomes when the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) or Department of Justice get on the case, to a litany of attacks on the Supreme Court’s impartiality.
The skepticism has become pervasive enough that the new House majority in Congress has stood up a Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. They are investigating efforts by law enforcement and intelligence agencies to gather information on Americans, and whether there is bias in ongoing investigations and free-speech matters.
That weaponization may be real, although it’s figurative.
But parallel to that, the federal government has quite literally been arming itself to the teeth! The number of federal bureaucrats who are now authorized to carry guns and execute arrests now outnumber the entire United States Marine Corps, which has 186,000 enlisted.
Two hundred thousand federal employees can carry, and we aren’t talking about just FBI agents or Drug Enforcement Agency employees. Departments from Health and Human Services (HHS) to Interior, from agencies like NASA to the IRS all have stockpiles of guns, ammunitions, and military-style equipment.
Last year, our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com found 103 executive agencies outside the Defense Department spent $2.7 billion on this gear between 2006 and 2019 — and 76 of them are not traditional law enforcement but pencil-pushing agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency or Department of Agriculture.
As of March 2023, that figure had jumped again to $3.7 billion, meaning the spending rate is steadily increasing.
Why does NASA need a team outfitted with SWAT-like equipment and armored vehicles? Why did Health & Human Services need to spend $154 million on guns and ammo since 2006? Its 500 armed special agents place it among the top 100 local police departments by headcount. How is the Department of Veterans Affairs using the 4,000 armed officers they now employ?
IRS, with its confiscatory powers, is growing its ranks after the passage of the so-called Inflation Reduction Act and has spent $35.2 million on weapons and gear since 2006, $10 million of that in the past three years alone. Who do they plan to fight?
When government officials do answer, it’s usually in vague terms, citing a need to send enforcement officials into potentially dangerous situations.
HHS, for example, commissioned a training facility, the National Training Operations Center, somewhere inside the Beltway, with its planning overseen by a private vendor called Fentress. The Fentress website no longer hosts the announcement they released detailing the project, but our auditors captured that it was for “ensuring operational readiness by maintaining all emergency response equipment” and “was intended to act as a crisis room or command post for the HHS headquarters staff.”
Since when do health officials need a “command post?”
Today, the lines are being blurred between general administrative agencies and traditional law enforcement.
As RealClearInvestigations journalist Mark Hemingway reported last year, “Critics say allowing federal agencies to perform their own law enforcement removes an important layer of accountability that existed when unarmed federal investigators were forced to cooperate with local authorities.”
Indeed, complicated problems abound with allowing these functions to proliferate outside of traditional law enforcement agencies. But when it comes to how tax dollars are used, one thing is abundantly clear: the government needs to get its arms around how much deadly equipment is laying around, how often it’s used and why.
There is no clear individual or entity that bears responsibility for cataloguing these weapons and ammunition stockpiles, how secure they may be, how frequently guns are discharged or the rationale. Though training facilities exist, it’s not clear whether every bureaucrat receives comparable training across the board. How safely are these weapons stockpiles stored and accounted for?
So, first, secure the gun lockers. Congress should use its oversight authority to ensure there is a uniform reporting standard for how many weapons, rounds of ammunition and other military-grade weaponry we have, and how all of it is housed and maintained.
Second, Congress should use its legislation authority to re-organize the arrest and firearm authority in the traditional paper-pushing, civil regulatory agencies — and bring those powers back to the traditional law enforcement agencies at the Department of Justice and Homeland Security.
Without such measures, the size, scope and power of federal agencies will continue to grow unabated. And as government grows, individual freedom and liberty shrink.
Adam Andrzejewski is CEO and Founder of OpenTheBooks.com, the largest private database of U.S. public sector expenditures.
There are over 459 Million guns in the United States. If they are treating us this shabbily when we’re armed to the teeth imaging what they would do to us if they took all the guns and ammo away from us. And gee, don’t think they wont come for the ammo too.
1774 – Gage restricts the distribution of gunpowder and has 300 barrels of gunpowder seized. Gage realizing, he is outnumbered he restricts powder & shot trying to use “ammo control” to disarm the people. Guns, powder and shot were however considered private property. King George III bans the importation of guns to the colonies also the importation of gunpowder, saltpeter and lead.
This is why we need to start eliminating worthless government agencies. If their big enough to weaponize we no longer need them. The IRS, dept of ED, dept of Interior have no business needing guns and could all be run with much smaller scale. Same with FBI if it’s big enough to be taking orders from one political party it’s too big. Fire the whole 3rd floor and move agents to states, out of the swamp where they get corrupted. The forefathers wanted us to have weapons to keep the government in check not the government to keep us in check.
It is in the nature of Fascism, Progressivism, Utopianism that the state will regulate (for the good of the people, of course) the path that the society, the private sector, will follow. Their means of transportation, of cooking their food, heating and lighting their homes, how their children will be indoctrinated (even fed in school lunch programs), to what news and information they will be exposed… Given the predictable resistance from dangerous radical elements of that private sector, all government agencies tasked with controlling and regulating the public behavior need to be armed in their own defense the better to control and limit the influence of those radicals, e.g. parents who want control over their children’s education. This militarization is particularly critical for the IRS given that inadequately indoctrinated private citizens will predictably resist turning over what they earn by their productivity to the government, ignorant of the reality that the government knows how to spend it wisely – and they don’t, as seen in the frivolous elective purchases they tend to make if allowed to manage their own money.
The Progressive Tax System put in place by the Woodrow Wilson administration was created to divide people and to be used as a weapon. So, it is not surprising that they would weaponize not only the IRS but all federal agencies. The founders are rolling over in their graves as they felt taxes should be applied equally to all citizens. The IRS can be defanged by instituting a flat tax or a national sales tax. The present system is Marxist in nature because it choses who pays and who does not. If everyone has skin in the game taxes might not be raised as many times and not as much as they have been.
I don’t think its complicated. Officers in local police departments have stated, usually off the record, that they will quit if ordered to go door to door taking weapons from Americans. So the commies in government are building a replacement force that is not sworn to uphold the constitution, and can be ordered to do what the local police and military cannot or will not do.
However, the 3% are EVERYWHERE.
Of particular concern is the fact that while arming all of these alphabet soup govt agencies, our federal, state and local governments have been proposing and enacting restrictions on the DIS-arming of law-abiding citizens…
Yes indeed – while we sleep!
That should be the absolute foremost concern of every citizen! The entire Bill of Rights is under attack. The administrations from the top down have been unlawfully restricting our rights for quite some time via “executive orders” and other unconstitutional procedures. For example: Nowhere in the US Constitution is there any written provision for the federal government to regulate public education. Yet the US Department of Education lords its unconstitutional authority over our local schools ad nauseum. The same goes for the other “alphabet soup” agencies for which there are no written constitutional provision. Part of the problem is that there is an entire generation of people who are clueless as to what their rights actually are. They have been duped into thinking that government is always acting in their best interest and blindly they submit to its every whim. It’s time for a wakeup call!
Most people comply without anything more than some whining and griping so, what’s their incentive to stop?
99% of the people out there are so hopelessly uneducated in even fundamental law that, they have some costumed imbecile pound on their door making demands and claiming to have a “warrant” and they don’t even know enough to say “well let me see it”. Wouldn’t know how to examine it and tell them to take their fraudulent instrument and go take a walk, even if they actually had it to present.
Crime rises in neighborhoods where people allow themselves to be victimized… Same goes for abuse by the Federal Corporation and it’s minions as well as by the local municipal terrorists. They’ve not yet been given any incentive to stop.