When was atf created?

Perhaps in part because of the sporadic way in which ATF’s jurisdiction has evolved, the agency has struggled to define a coherent and manageable mission and to implement effective protocols and policies to adequately fulfill that mission, particularly with respect to firearms regulation and enforcement. Asserting itself within the larger framework of federal law enforcement agencies has also posed a challenge for ATF. Periodically, efforts have been made to rebrand the agency or  reimagine ATF’s role—including a significant restructuring of the agency as part of the Homeland Security Act of 2002, which moved ATF from the Department of the Treasury to the Department of Justice, or DOJ—but none of these efforts succeeded in addressing all of the challenges facing the agency. These prior attempts to restructure ATF and refine its mission have been undertaken in an atmosphere of intense political scrutiny. After all, ATF is the lead federal agency tackling one of the nation’s most vexing and charged policy concerns: gun violence. And for the past two decades, that already challenging assignment has become even more difficult, as a series of controversies—the siege at Waco, the funding of its new headquarters, its operations at gun shows, and the Fast and Furious gun trafficking operation—have put ATF squarely in the crosshairs of congressional scrutiny and created opportunities for those in the gun lobby determined to debilitate the agency.

An unfortunate legacy of ATF’s evolution is that it suffers from an identity crisis. On the one hand, ATF at times envisions itself as the federal violent-crime police, addressing gun violence through the rubric of broader federal efforts to combat violent gang and drug-related crimes. But ATF was not originally designed to be a police agency and often lacks the internal management and oversight structure required for consistently effective federal law enforcement operations. On the other hand, ATF serves a crucial regulatory function as the sole federal agency responsible for overseeing the lawful commerce in firearms and explosives. Yet the agency has often channeled scarce resources away from the regulatory side of the house and has marginalized the regulatory personnel within the agency. This lack of a clear focus on either enforcement or regulation has prevented ATF from fulfilling any part of its mission quite well enough.

Highlighting the challenges that ATF faces is not just another idle exercise in criticizing the inefficient bureaucracy of the federal government. The problem of gun violence in the United States is urgent: Every day in America, assailants using guns murder 33 people. It is imperative that the federal government takes action to enforce the laws designed to stem the tide of this violence and that it does more to ensure that guns do not end up in the hands of criminals and other dangerous individuals. ATF is the agency charged with that responsibility, and it is well past time for the administration and Congress to take a serious look at ATF and other federal law enforcement agencies to come up with a comprehensive plan to create a strong federal framework to combat gun violence and the illegal trafficking of firearms. While there have been remarkable reductions in violent crime across the country—driven in part by federal law enforcement’s partnerships with local police—illegal gun access continues to contribute to murder rates in the United States that far outpace those in comparable countries. The problem of gun crime in the United States and the daily toll of gun deaths on our communities warrant something new—a large-scale rethinking of how the federal government should address gun violence and illegal firearms trafficking and what ATF’s role should be in that effort.

As reformers in Congress and the administration consider options for how to make ATF function better, it is important to recognize that the agency is composed of dedicated, hardworking agents and civilian staff who do many things very well. In some respects, ATF has been a remarkably successful agency in recent decades. ATF agents as a group are exceptionally productive by traditional measures, especially when compared with agents at other federal law enforcement agencies. In 2013, ATF agents were remarkably productive in the development of cases for prosecution—outperforming Federal Bureau of Investigation, or FBI, agents 3-to-1—averaging 3.4 cases per agent referred to the U.S. Attorneys’ Office for prosecution for every 1 case per FBI agent. ATF agents, more so than most others in federal law enforcement, also have a strong reputation across the country for being assets and effective partners to local law enforcement agencies. ATF agents consistently offer real value and support to local police departments in their efforts to combat local gun crime. Furthermore, ATF has played a role in the overall decline in crime in recent years—the violent crime rate declined 19 percent between 2003 and 2012, and the murder rate declined 17 percent during that period—by taking thousands of violent criminals and gun and drug traffickers off the streets. Between 2005 and 2012, ATF referred more than 13,000 cases involving more than 27,000 defendants suspected of firearms trafficking to the U.S. Attorneys’ Office for prosecution.

Despite these areas of success, ATF has faced some serious challenges in its efforts to be the federal agency charged with enforcing the nation’s gun laws, combating gun crime, and regulating the firearms industry. This report seeks to offer recommendations for how to improve federal enforcement and regulation of guns that recognize and build on the formidable assets that ATF already has—but it does so while recognizing that the status quo is not enough. Although ATF has had many successes, its capabilities are inadequate in relation to the scope of the gun crime challenge in the United States. Therefore, this report does not focus on a series of piecemeal recommendations to improve ATF’s current operations. Prior evaluations, including ones written by authors of this report, make such recommendations; some of them have been acted upon, and others would certainly offer substantial benefits to the functionality and success of the agency. But this report finds that something bigger needs to happen to address the challenges that ATF faces.

What is that something? It begins with a recognition that the United States already has the world’s premiere national law enforcement agency: the FBI. This report concludes that ATF, both its personnel and its mission responsibilities, should be merged into the FBI. The FBI—bolstered by the agents, expertise, and resources of a subsumed ATF—should take over primary jurisdiction of federal firearms enforcement.

In addition to its focus on protecting the nation against terrorism, the FBI has jurisdiction over the enforcement of federal criminal laws and currently operates hundreds of initiatives and operations directed at various types of criminal activity, including violent crime. The FBI is a politically strong and well-respected agency and is therefore able to operate above the fray of politics with adequate funding and resources. The FBI director typically serves a 10-year term across presidencies and through numerous election cycles, which serves to shield the agency’s work from the vicissitudes of elections, partisan politics, and interest group lobbying. And, as is relevant here, the FBI is already deeply involved in federal efforts to combat and prevent gun violence.

This report examines ATF’s existing mission responsibilities and its track record of delivering results. It recommends that Congress and the Obama administration take action to merge ATF and the FBI and make ATF a subordinate division of that agency. This report finds that such action would help address the following three primary challenges that have plagued ATF for years: inadequate management, insufficient resources and burdensome restrictions, and lack of coordination.

The haphazard way in which ATF has evolved over the years has contributed to fractured leadership at every level. At the highest level, the agency has been passed along from the Department of the Treasury, where it was housed in its current form for 30 years, to DOJ via the Homeland Security Act in 2002. In the more than a decade that ATF has been part of DOJ, it has not been adequately incorporated into the larger family of federal law enforcement agencies, and there has been insufficient oversight of its activities, particularly in the context of developing large-scale operations to address issues of national importance, such as gun trafficking to Mexico.

At the executive level within ATF, the agency has suffered from congressional efforts to keep it without a confirmed director. Prior to August 2013, ATF had been without a full-time, permanent leader for seven years. During that time, ATF was led by a series of acting directors, many of whom worked part time and remotely, while the Senate refused to seriously consider any nominee for director and simultaneously criticized the agency for its lack of leadership. Without a permanent, full-time director, ATF was stuck in limbo, unable to engage in long-term strategic planning and vulnerable to continuous attacks on its competency and effectiveness. While ATF had the benefit of a full-time, confirmed director for 20 months, with former Director B. Todd Jones’ resignation at the end of March 2015, the agency is once again without permanent leadership and likely faces another lengthy period without a confirmed director as the politics of that nomination play out in the same manner as each previous nomination for the position.

There are also extensive management challenges present in other levels of the agency. The leadership vacuum is also apparent on the ground in the field divisions. Over the past 20 years, the agency has developed a culture of limited oversight and lack of accountability that has resulted in a structure of largely autonomous local field divisions that have too little connection to the executive leadership at the agency’s headquarters or to each other. This decentralized structure at times has left room for innovation by the agency’s many talented special agents and, in many offices, has resulted in strong investigative work. But too often, successful strategies in one field division are not transferred to other divisions—and worse, this autonomy has led to a culture of complacency in some field divisions, which has resulted in significant misjudgments and mistakes. Director Jones took important steps to address many of these management challenges, but these problems and the culture that underlies them have developed for decades. It may be beyond the capability of even an exceptionally qualified director to fix some of them.

These weaknesses in leadership throughout ATF have had a significant deleterious effect on morale within the agency. In 2004, ATF ranked 8th out of more than 200 agencies and departments in an annual survey of federal employees about the best offices to work for in the federal government. But by 2014, ATF had dropped to 148th out of 315 agencies and departments overall and ranked 279th out of 314 agencies for “effective leadership” of “senior leaders.” Director Jones himself noted the poor morale among the rank and file when he took over as acting director, describing ATF at that time as an “agency in distress” and saying that “oor morale undermined the efforts of the overwhelming majority of ATF.”

ATF’s primary responsibility is enforcing the nation’s gun laws—a responsibility that puts the agency at the center of a political issue that has often been described as the “third rail” of American politics. Particularly in the past two decades, the gun lobby, led by the National Rifle Association, or NRA, has sought to enforce an iron grip over Washington, using both its significant financial resources and its ability to mobilize its members to coerce and cajole Congress into doing its bidding. The NRA has focused its power on three related priorities: enacting laws that loosen or eliminate restrictions on gun owners, crippling ATF with budget restrictions so that it cannot effectively regulate the gun industry and enforce federal firearms laws, and limiting the resources available to ATF to enforce these weak laws under tight policy restrictions.

Too often, the gun lobby has succeeded in these efforts. ATF has watched as its budget has slowly stagnated over the past 10 years, even as the budgets of other federal law enforcement agencies have steadily increased. For example, between 2005 and 2014, the FBI’s budget increased 62 percent, Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s budget increased 46 percent, and Customs and Border Protection’s budget increased 94 percent. In contrast, the budget for ATF increased from around $878 million in 2005 to only $1.18 billion in 2014, a modest increase of around 34 percent that, when adjusted for inflation, amounts to only a 10 percent increase.

This budget environment means that ATF is significantly underresourced, both compared with other law enforcement agencies and with its own staffing levels of a few years ago. In 2014, ATF employed 2,490 special agents—only 173 more agents than the agency employed in 2001. The number of ATF agents currently in the field nationwide investigating gun crime and illegal firearm trafficking is less than the individual police forces of Dallas, Texas; Washington, D.C.; and many other major metropolitan police departments, making it nearly impossible for these agents to adequately address gun crime across the country. The regulatory side of the house is in even more dire shape. In 2014, ATF employed only 780 investigators to regulate the nation’s firearms manufacturers, importers, and dealers, as well as the explosives industry. That is 18.8 percent fewer investigators than the agency employed in 2001, yet the size of the industry they are charged with regulating grew substantially during the same period.

In addition to these budget shortfalls, ATF is also hamstrung by a series of riders to annual appropriations legislation that have hobbled the agency and limited its ability to fulfill even the most basic parts of its mission. These riders, which number more than a dozen, have been tacked onto appropriations legislation at the behest of the gun lobby and impose severe restrictions on ATF’s activities, including limitations on ATF’s ability to manage its data in a modern and efficient manner, measures that interfere with the disclosure and use of data critical to law enforcement and public health research, and prohibitions on activities to regulate and oversee firearms dealers. Merging ATF into the FBI would have the immediate effect of voiding these dangerous and unnecessary budget restrictions—and, more broadly, the merger would help insulate the mission of enforcing federal gun laws from political interference while helping provide a new infusion of resources.

Gun crime presents an exceedingly complicated challenge. There are an estimated 300 million guns in private hands in the United States, and gun ownership is a strong tradition in our country’s history that is protected by the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. While America experiences violent crime rates similar to other comparable nations, it has extraordinarily high rates of murder and gun crimes. Effectively combating this gun crime and preventing future gun violence is further complicated by the facts that gun laws vary widely across states and gun violence is often intertwined with other criminal activity, such as gang violence and illegal drug trafficking. In order to be effective, therefore, ATF must be able to coordinate with local law enforcement agencies to identify the individuals responsible for gun violence in a community, apprehend such individuals, and obtain information from them regarding from where the illegal guns are coming.

By and large, ATF is quite effective at this type of coordination. However, a significant portion of gun-related crime has an interstate element. For example, in 2009, 30 percent of guns that were recovered from crimes and could be traced had originally been purchased in another state. For this reason, there must also be a strong federal law enforcement agency to take the lead on investigating this type of multijurisdictional criminal problem. In recent years, ATF has made an effort to position itself as this agency, asserting that it is the primary federal law enforcement agency addressing violent crime, including gun crime, in communities around the country.

Efforts to paint ATF as the federal violent-crime police put it in tension with the mission of the FBI, which is in part “to uphold and enforce the criminal laws of the United States.” This conflict is more than just semantic. There exists considerable overlap between the work and resources of ATF and the FBI in the areas of guns, explosives, and violent crime. For example, the FBI has a well-established anti-gang initiative that targets violent street gangs across the country. But ATF has also targeted violent gangs for investigation because of their use of guns in crimes and often works with local law enforcement to bring gang-related cases to federal court. The FBI operates the National Instant Criminal Background Check System used for gun sales by federally licensed dealers, but ATF operates the regulatory system that issues those licenses and the database for tracing crime guns. Both agencies have extensive training programs for explosives forensics and investigations, and both agencies operate numerous forensic laboratories that process evidence from violent crime scenes. Both agencies have specially trained response teams to handle emergencies such as hostage-taking, serious explosive-related incidents, and large-scale special events such as the Super Bowl.

Despite the significant overlap in the mission, resources, and expertise of these two agencies with respect to firearms enforcement, explosives, and violent crime, ATF and the FBI have been unable to consistently and effectively collaborate to define a singular plan for combating gun violence and illegal gun trafficking in the United States—or such a plan around explosives investigations. Many attempts to improve coordination have been made by the leaders of both agencies, and all have failed to truly solve the problem. Indeed, the relationship between the two agencies has often been characterized more by competition over cases and turf battles than by collaboration and cooperation. Finding a way to foster such collaboration would have two significant benefits. First, combining the assets of these two agencies would reduce overlap and waste and would provide some cost savings at a time when all government agencies are struggling to maintain budgets. And merging the expertise of these two agencies would result in more effective and successful enforcement of federal firearms and explosives laws and a better approach to combat violent crime.

The proposal to merge ATF into the FBI is not a reactionary proposal aimed at “fixing” ATF based on its most recent political or organizational challenges. Rather, this proposal is offered in an attempt to define a fresh vision of how the federal government could best address the issue of gun violence in this country. If we were to start from scratch, how would we structure federal law enforcement to most effectively enforce criminal gun laws and regulate the gun industry? We would almost certainly create one central law enforcement agency charged with that mission and would ensure that this agency had adequate resources and the political support necessary to succeed. We would take steps to minimize agency overlap and jurisdictional confusion and would position that one federal agency to enhance the work of local law enforcement to combat violent crime and ensure that guns do not end up in the hands of dangerous people. And we would structure that agency to provide strong leadership, management, oversight, and accountability to ensure that its enforcement activities were successful. Merging ATF into the FBI is a way of creating this kind of agency. This merger would also enhance ATF’s other mission areas, particularly explosives, arson, and emergency response.

The recommendations made in this report are the result of an 18-month investigation into ATF: what is working, what is lacking, and what the agency would need to be truly successful. The information contained herein comes from an extensive review of publicly available information about ATF and the FBI, as well as interviews with more than 50 current and former employees of both agencies and those who supported or supervised ATF and the FBI at the Justice and Treasury departments. The authors also spoke with congressional staff charged with overseeing ATF, local law enforcement officials, researchers who have studied gun crime, and other persons whose knowledge and experience might offer insight. In many cases that involve current and former agents and employees of ATF, the FBI, and the Justice Department, information is presented here anonymously to protect the confidentiality of sources—particularly those who continue to work for the federal government and were thus not authorized to speak to the authors.

In the pages that follow, we provide a detailed examination of ATF and other aspects of federal firearms enforcement that includes:

United States federal agencies, like The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, and Explosives (ATF or BATF), can provide useful information in a forensic investigation. The ATF is responsible for enforcing federal law with regard to the sale and use of alcohol, tobacco, firearms, and explosives. In accordance with the Homeland Security Act of 2002, on January 24, 2003, the ATF was transferred from the Department of the Treasury to the Department of Justice. Though the Bureau has had authority over explosives since 1972, its name did not reflect this until its transfer in 2003; it still retains the initials ATF.

Although the ATF itself was created in 1972, at that time making it the youngest tax-collecting office of the Treasury Department, its roots go back to the founding days of the Republic. The order of items in its name corresponds to the order in which Treasury began to assume control over the items themselves: alcohol in the post-Revolutionary War era, tobacco around the time of the Civil War, and firearms during the Great Depression.

Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the Treasury, suggested that Congress impose a tax on imported spirits to pay a portion of the debt incurred in the War of Independence. Congress passed a resolution calling for such a tax, and in 1789 gave Treasury responsibility for collecting it. An Act passed in 1862 created the Office of Internal Revenue, whose responsibilities included the collection of taxes on spirits and tobacco products. Renamed the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) in 1877, in 1886 it established a laboratory that in time would assume responsibility for analyzing a variety of alcohol and tobacco products, as well as firearms and explosives.

Following the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment, which banned the sale, distribution, and consumption of alcohol, Treasury in 1920 established the Prohibition Unit. The deeds of "revenuers" and "Tmen" such as Eliot Ness in the years that followed would become legendary, as would the less admirable exploits of gangsters such as Al Capone. Nationwide concern over the violence associated with organized crime led to the passage of the National Firearms Act in 1934. Four years later, Congress passed the Federal Firearms Act, and BIR became responsible for collecting taxes on firearms.

After a number of changes in the section of BIR concerned with alcohol taxes, in 1940 this division became the ATU, or Alcohol Tax Unit. In 1942 Congress gave ATU responsibility for enforcing the Firearms Act.

Throughout much of the preceding century, BIR had included a Miscellaneous Tax Unit (MTU), which had responsibility for tobacco taxes and, between 1934 and 1942, taxes on firearms. In 1952, MTU was dismantled, and its firearms and tobacco tax functions fell under ATU. At the same time, BIR received a new name, one familiar to millions of Americans today: the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). ATU then came under IRS control as the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax Division, an arrangement that lasted for two decades.

In 1968, when Congress passed the Gun Control Act, the old BIR/IRS laboratory became responsible for analyzing firearms and explosives, and the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax Division became the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) Division. The 1970 passage of the Organized Crime Control Act made the role of the ATF Division more explicit, and signaled a shift away from IRS purview. On June 1, 1972, the Treasury Department issued Order No. 120-1, which separated the ATF from the IRS.

The order gave the new bureau authority not only over the three items listed in its name, but also over explosives. During the 1970s, ATF and its laboratory became involved in arson investigations, and in 1982, Congress amended Title XI of the Organized Crime Control Act to make arson a federal crime and formalize the ATF's role in investigating it.

Description The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, commonly referred to as the ATF, is a domestic law enforcement agency within the United States Department of Justice. Wikipedia

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATFE), commonly referred to as the ATF, is a domestic law enforcement agency within the United States Department of Justice. Its responsibilities include the investigation and prevention of federal offenses involving the unlawful use, manufacture, and possession of firearms and explosives; acts of arson and bombings; and illegal trafficking and tax evasion of alcohol and tobacco products. The ATF also regulates via licensing the sale, possession, and transportation of firearms, ammunition, and explosives in interstate commerce. Many of the ATF's activities are carried out in conjunction with task forces made up of state and local law enforcement officers, such as Project Safe Neighborhoods. The ATF operates a unique fire research laboratory in Beltsville, Maryland, where full-scale mock-ups of criminal arson can be reconstructed. The ATF had 5,285 employees and an annual budget of almost $1.5 billion in 2021. The ATF has received criticism over the Ruby Ridge controversy, the Waco siege controversy and others.

The ATF was formerly part of the United States Department of the Treasury, having been formed in 1886 as the "Revenue Laboratory" within the Treasury Department's Bureau of Internal Revenue. The history of ATF can be subsequently traced to the time of the revenuers or "revenoors" and the Bureau of Prohibition, which was formed as a unit of the Bureau of Internal Revenue in 1920. It was made an independent agency within the Treasury Department in 1927, was transferred to the Justice Department in 1930, and became, briefly, a division of the FBI in 1933.

When the Volstead Act, which established Prohibition in the United States, was repealed in December 1933, the Unit was transferred from the Department of Justice back to the Department of the Treasury, where it became the Alcohol Tax Unit (ATU) of the Bureau of Internal Revenue. Special Agent Eliot Ness and several members of The "Untouchables", who had worked for the Prohibition Bureau while the Volstead Act was still in force, were transferred to the ATU. In 1942, responsibility for enforcing federal firearms laws was given to the ATU.

In the early 1950s, the Bureau of Internal Revenue was renamed "Internal Revenue Service" (IRS), and the ATU was given the additional responsibility of enforcing federal tobacco tax laws. At this time, the name of the ATU was changed to the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax Division (ATTD).

In 1968, with the passage of the Gun Control Act, the agency changed its name again, this time to the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms Division of the IRS and first began to be referred to by the initials "ATF". In Title XI of the Organized Crime Control Act of 1970, Congress enacted the Explosives Control Act, 18 U.S.C.A. Chapter 40, which provided for close regulation of the explosives industry and designated certain arsons and bombings as federal crimes. The Secretary of the Treasury was made responsible for administering the regulatory aspects of the new law, and was given jurisdiction over criminal violations relating to the regulatory controls. These responsibilities were delegated to the ATF division of the IRS. The Secretary and the Attorney General were given concurrent jurisdiction over arson and bombing offenses. Pub.L. 91-452, 84 Stat. 922, October 15, 1970.

In 1972, ATF was officially established as an independent bureau within the Treasury Department on July 1, 1972, this transferred the responsibilities of the ATF division of the IRS to the new Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. Rex D. Davis oversaw the transition, becoming the bureau's first director, having headed the division since 1970. During his tenure, Davis shepherded the organization into a new era where federal firearms and explosives laws addressing violent crime became the primary mission of the agency. However, taxation and other alcohol issues remained priorities as ATF collected billions of dollars in alcohol and tobacco taxes, and undertook major revisions of the federal wine labeling regulations relating to use of appellations of origin and varietal designations on wine labels.

In the wake of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush signed into law the Homeland Security Act of 2002. In addition to the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the law shifted ATF from the Department of the Treasury to the Department of Justice. The agency's name was changed to Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. However, the agency still was referred to as the "ATF" for all purposes. Additionally, the task of collection of federal tax revenue derived from the production of tobacco and alcohol products and the regulatory function related to protecting the public in issues related to the production of alcohol, previously handled by the Bureau of Internal Revenue as well as by ATF, was transferred to the newly established Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB), which remained within the Treasury Department. These changes took effect January 24, 2003.

Complaints regarding the techniques used by ATF in their effort to generate firearm cases led to hearings before Congressional committees in the late 1970s and 1980s. At these hearings, evidence was received from citizens who had been charged by ATF, from experts who had studied ATF, and from officials of the bureau itself. A Senate subcommittee report stated, "Based upon these hearings it is apparent that ATF enforcement tactics made possible by current federal firearms laws are constitutionally, legally, and practically reprehensible.": 20  The Subcommittee received evidence that ATF primarily devoted its firearms enforcement efforts to the apprehension, upon technical malum prohibitum charges, of individuals who lack all criminal intent and knowledge. Evidence received demonstrated that ATF agents tended to concentrate upon collector's items rather than "criminal street guns". In hearings before ATF's Appropriations Subcommittee, testimony was submitted estimating that 75 percent of ATF gun prosecutions were aimed at ordinary citizens with no criminal intent. The Firearm Owners Protection Act of 1986 addressed some of the abuses noted in the 1982 Senate Judiciary Subcommittee report.

The Ruby Ridge Siege began in June 1990. Randy Weaver sold two unregistered short barrel shotguns to Kenneth Fadeley, an ATF informant. This transaction was recorded and presented to the court. Weaver refused to face his accusers and became a fugitive from justice. He maintained the barrels were a legal length, but after Fadeley took possession, the shotguns were later found to be shorter than allowed by federal law, requiring registration as a short-barreled shotgun and payment of a $200 tax. The ATF brought firearms charges against Weaver, but offered to drop the charges if he would become an informant. After Weaver refused to cooperate, ATF passed on false information about Weaver to other agencies that became part of a misleading file that profiled Weaver as having explosive booby traps, tunnels, and bunkers at his home; growing marijuana; having felony convictions; and being a bank robber. At his later trial, the gun charges were determined to be entrapment and Weaver was acquitted. However, Weaver missed a February 20, 1991, court date because U.S. Probation Officer Richins mistakenly told Weaver that the trial date was March 20, and the US Marshals Service (USMS) was charged with bringing Weaver in. Weaver remained with his family in their mountain top cabin. On August 21, 1992, a USMS surveillance team encountered Weaver, a friend and family members on a trail near the cabin, resulting in a shootout that killed US Marshal Bill Degan, Weaver's son Samuel, and Weaver's pet dog. FBI Hostage Rescue Team (HRT) members surrounded the cabin. The next day, HRT sniper Lon Horiuchi fired at Weaver, missing and killing Weaver's wife. A subsequent Department of Justice review and a Congressional hearing raised several questions about the actions of ATF, USMS, USAO, and FBI HRT and the mishandling of intelligence at the USMS and FBI headquarters. The Ruby Ridge incident has become a lightning rod for legal activists within the gun rights community.

On May 1, 1992, 50 ATF agents were summoned upon to provide extra support for local police departments in Los Angeles County in response to the ongoing Rodney King riots. The next day, the ATF activated its Special Response Team tactical unit to escort firefighters in high-risk areas, pair up with local police in protecting certain establishments, and execute search warrants for looted firearms. During the riots, a total of 4,690 firearms were looted and stolen; over the next 10 days, ATF recovered fewer than 200 firearms.

The ATF was involved in the Waco Siege against the Branch Davidian religious sect near Waco, Texas, on February 28, 1993. ATF agents, accompanied by the press, conducted a raid to execute a federal search warrant on the sect's compound, known as Mt. Carmel. The Branch Davidians were alerted to the upcoming warrant execution but ATF raid leaders pressed on, despite knowing the advantage of surprise was lost. (ATF Director Steve Higgins had promised Treasury Under Secretary for Enforcement Ron Noble that the Waco raid would be canceled if the ATF undercover agent Robert Rodriguez reported that the element of surprise had been lost.) The resulting exchange of gunfire killed six Davidians and four ATF agents. FBI HRT later took over the scene and a 51-day stand-off ensued, ending on April 19, 1993, after the complex caught fire. The follow-up investigation revealed the bodies of seventy-six people including twenty children inside the compound. A grand jury found that the deaths were suicides or otherwise caused by people inside the building. Shortly after the raid, the bureau's director, Stephen E. Higgins, retired early from his position. In December 1994, two ATF supervisory agents, Phillip J. Chojnacki and Charles D. Sarabyn, who were suspended for their roles in leading the Waco raid were reinstated, with full back pay and benefits (with a demotion) despite a Treasury Department report of gross negligence. The incident was removed from their personnel files.

Timothy McVeigh cited Ruby Ridge and Waco Siege as his motivation for the Oklahoma City Bombing, which took place on April 19, 1995, exactly two years after the end of the Waco Siege. McVeigh's criterion for attack sites was that the target should house at least two of three federal law enforcement agencies: the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). He regarded the presence of additional law enforcement agencies, such as the Secret Service or the U.S. Marshals Service, as a bonus. Until the September 11, 2001, attacks, the Oklahoma City bombing was the deadliest terrorist attack in the history of the United States, and remains the deadliest incident of domestic terrorism in the country's history. McVeigh was executed for this mass murder by lethal injection on June 11, 2001, at the Federal Correctional Complex in Terre Haute, Indiana.

The ATF was criticized for poor planning leading up to a shootout at Stevenson Ranch, California, in 2001, which resulted in the immediate deaths of a deputy sheriff as well as the suspect, and the later suicide of ATF agent Jeff Ryan.

Following the attacks on September 11, 2001, the ATF expanded regulations covering fuels used in amateur rocketry, including ammonium perchlorate composite propellant (APCP). Two rocketry clubs, the National Association of Rocketry (NAR) and the Tripoli Rocketry Association (TRA), argued that APCP is not explosive and that the ATF's regulations were unreasonable. The NAR and TRA won their lawsuit against the ATF in 2009, lifting the government restrictions. The associations maintain their own restrictions, and rocketry is also regulated by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

Between May 2004 and August 2005, ATF agents, in conjunction with Virginia state, county, and city police, conducted an operation at eight gun shows in the Richmond area to reduce straw purchases for criminals.: 10  In a February 2006 House subcommittee hearing, the show's owner said: "People were approached and discouraged from purchasing guns. Before attempting to purchase, they were interrogated and accused of being in the business without a license, detained in police vehicles, and gun buyer's homes were visited by police, and much more.": 19  A gun salesman testified that he was singled out for harassment by two ATF agents.: 28  The owner of a gun shop testified that he thought agents questioned female customers too often. He said that times had changed and more women were shopping for guns, adding: "It seems, however, to be the prevailing opinion for law enforcement at the gun show that any woman who brings a male friend for advice or support must be making a straw purchase.": 38  A private investigator said the National Rifle Association (NRA) contracted her to go to Richmond to investigate dozens of complaints by NRA members of "massive law enforcement presence, residence checks, and minority buyers being followed, pulled over and their legally purchased guns seized.": 41  The purchasers were compelled by an ATF letter to appear at ATF offices to explain and justify their purchases. ATF stated this was a pilot program that ATF was planning to apply throughout the country. In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, ATF agents visited a gun show's customers' homes a week after the show, demanding to see the buyers' guns or sale paperwork and arresting those who could not—or would not—comply.

A September 2008 report by the Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General determined that 76 firearms and 418 laptop computers were lost, stolen, or missing from ATF, after a 59-month audit period between 2002 and 2007.

In May 2008, William Newell, Special Agent in charge of the Phoenix ATF Office, said: "When 90 percent-plus of the firearms recovered from these violent drug cartels are from a U.S. source, we have a responsibility to do everything we can to stem the illegal flow of these firearms to these thugs." According to the Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General, "ATF told the OIG that the 90-percent figure ... could be misleading because it applied only to the small portion of Mexican crime guns that are traced." Under operations "Fast and Furious," "Too Hot to Handle," and "Wide Receiver," indictments show that the Phoenix ATF Office, over protests from the gun dealers and some ATF agents involved and without notifying Mexican authorities, facilitated the sale of over 2,500 firearms (AK-47 rifles, FN 5.7mm pistols, and .50 caliber rifles) to traffickers destined for Mexico. Many of these same guns are being recovered from crime scenes in Arizona and throughout Mexico, which is artificially inflating ATF's eTrace statistics of U.S. origin guns seized in Mexico. One gun is alleged to be the weapon used by a Mexican national to murder Customs and Border Protection Agent Brian Terry on December 14, 2010. ATF and DOJ denied all allegations. After appearing at a Congressional Hearing, three supervisors of Fast and Furious (William G. McMahon, Newell, and David Voth) were reported as being transferred and promoted by ATF. ATF denied the transfers were promotions.

In June 2011, Vince Cefalu, an ATF special agent for 24 years who in December 2010 exposed ATF's Project Gunrunner scandal, was notified of his termination. Two days before the termination, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, sent a letter to the ATF warning officials not to retaliate against whistleblowers. Cefalu's dismissal followed allegations that ATF retaliates against whistleblowers. ATF spokesman Drew Wade denied that the bureau is retaliating but declined to comment about Cefalu's case.

In 2015, a proposal by the ATF to prohibit sales of certain 5.56 x 45mm ammunition was dropped following a negative response from the public and the legislature.

In 2022, the DOJ Office of the Inspector General (OIG) conducted an audit which found that "thousands of firearms, firearm parts, and ammunition had been stolen from National Firearms and Ammunition Destruction (NFAD) from 2016 to 2019." The NFAD is the branch of the ATF uses to dispose of firearms forfeited to the ATF. The report also stated that the ATF has improved its process to reduce thefts but that it still has not implemented all of the recommendations made by the DOJ.

In 2006, the National Rifle Association (NRA) lobbied U.S. Representative F. James Sensenbrenner to add a provision to the Patriot Act reauthorization that requires Senate confirmation of ATF director nominees. (Prior to that, ATF directors were simply appointed by the administration.) After that, the NRA lobbied against and effectively blocked all but one presidential nominee until 2022.

In 2007, President George W. Bush nominated Mike Sullivan for the position, a U.S. Attorney from Boston with a good reputation, but Republican Sens. Larry Craig and Michael D. Crapo, both from Idaho, blocked his confirmation after complaints from an Idaho firearms dealer. In 2010, President Barack Obama nominated Andrew L. Traver, head of the ATF's Denver division, to fill the top spot, but the Senate never held his confirmation hearings. The NRA strongly opposed Traver's nomination.

Subsequent failed nominations included Fraternal Order of Police president Chuck Canterbury (nominated by Donald Trump) and former ATF agent David Chipman (nominated by Joe Biden).

B. Todd Jones was nominated by President Barack Obama and confirmed by the Senate as permanent ATF director on July 31, 2013, serving until March 31, 2015. Jones was the only successful Senate-approved appointment until the Senate confirmed Steve Dettelbach in July 2022. Dettelbach's confirmation required a procedural maneuver to advance his nomination out of Senate Judiciary committee. It passed the evenly-divided Senate due to two Republicans voting with the Democrats to confirm.

Since 2001, ATF agents have recommended over 10,000 felons every year for federal prosecution for firearms possession through the Project Safe Neighborhoods framework. In PSN's first year, 2001–2002, over 7,700 of these cases resulted in convictions with an average sentence of over five years per defendant. This number had risen to over 12,000 prosecutions in FY 2007. The annual FBI Uniform Crime Report (UCR) demonstrated that from 2001 to 2010, the reduction of violent crime offenses in United States districts with dedicated Project Safe Neighborhood Agents and United States Attorneys far outperformed the national average. An outgrowth of the Project Safe Neighborhoods framework was the creation of Violent Crime Impact Teams which worked proactively to identify, disrupt, arrest and prosecute the most violent criminals through innovative technology, analytical investigative resources and an integrated federal, state and local law enforcement strategy.

Generally, about 90% of the cases referred by ATF for prosecution each year are for firearms, violent crime, and narcotics offenses. Through the first half of 2011, ATF (with fewer than 2,000 active Special Agents) had recommended 5,203 cases for prosecution. This yields an average of 5.0 cases per agent per year. For comparison, the FBI (with slightly more than 13,000 active Special Agents) had recommended 8,819 cases for prosecution, for an average of 1.2 cases per agent per year.

ATF, as a bureau, consists of several different groups that each have their own respective role, commanded by a director. Special Agents are empowered to conduct criminal investigations, defend the United States against international and domestic terrorism, and work with state and local police officers to reduce violent crime on a national level. ATF Special Agents may carry firearms, serve warrants and subpoenas issued under the authority of the United States and make arrests without warrant for any offense against the United States committed in their presence, or for any felony cognizable under the laws of the United States if they have reasonable grounds to believe that the person to be arrested has committed or is committing such felony 18 U.S.C. § 3051. Specifically, ATF Special Agents have lead investigative authority on any federal crime committed with a firearm or explosive, as well as investigative authority over regulatory referrals and cigarette smuggling. All ATF Special Agents require a Top Secret (TS) security clearance, and in many instances, need a higher level, TS/SCI/SAP (Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information/Special Access Programs) clearance. In order to get a security clearance, all potential ATF Special Agents must pass a detailed series of Single Scope Background Investigations (SSBI). ATF Special Agents consistently rank at the top or near the top of all federal agencies in cases referred for prosecution, arrests made, and average time per defendant on an annual basis. Special Agents currently comprise around 2,400 of the Agency's approximately 5,000 personnel.

Industry Operations Investigators (IOIs) are the backbone of the ATF regulatory mission. Their work is primarily investigative and routinely involves contact with, and interviews of, individuals from all walks of life and all levels of industry and government. Investigations and inspections pertain to the industries and persons regulated by ATF (e.g., firearms and explosives users, dealers, importers, exporters, manufacturers, wholesalers, etc.); and are under the jurisdiction of the Gun Control Act, National Firearms Act, Arms Export Control Act, Organized Crime Control Act of 1970, and other Federal firearms and explosives laws and regulations.

The remainder of the bureau is personnel in various staff and support roles from office administrative assistants to intelligence analysts, forensic scientists, legal counsel, and technical specialists. Additionally, ATF relies heavily on state and local task force officers to supplement the Special Agents and who are not officially part of the ATF roster.

Basic special agent training for new hires consists of a two-part training program. The first part is the Criminal Investigator Training Program (CITP) provided by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC) in Glynco, Georgia. The CITP provides fundamental training in the techniques, concepts, and methodologies of conducting criminal investigations. Some of the subjects covered in the training include training in firearms, physical techniques, driving techniques, handcuffing, interviewing, surveillance, crime scene management, photography, basic firearms training, and federal court procedures. The CITP lasts approximately 12 weeks. Each class consists of 48 students, of whom approximately half are ATF trainees. The remaining portion of the CITP class consists of students from other federal agencies.

The second part of training is the Special Agent Basic Training (SABT), which is conducted at FLETC. The SABT for special agent trainees is a demanding and intensive training program that covers a wide range of disciplines including firearms and ammunition identification; firearms trafficking; report writing, interviewing techniques; alcohol/tobacco diversion investigations; explosives and fire/arson investigations; firearms and tactical training, close quarter countermeasures; field operations, undercover techniques; and physical conditioning. The SABT consists of approximately 15 weeks of training with a class of 24 student trainees.

Industry Operations Investigator Basic Training (IOIBT) is a comprehensive 10-week program designed to train newly hired industry operations investigators (IOI) in the basic knowledge, skills, and abilities they need to effectively conduct inspections of firearms and explosives licensees and permittees, as well as provide assistance to other Federal, State, and local law enforcement agencies. Successful completion of IOIBT is mandatory in order for the newly hired IOI to maintain their employment.

ATF's Special Response Teams (SRTs) are elite tactical groups that rapidly respond to high-risk law enforcement operations and conduct criminal investigations that lead to the arrests of the most violent criminals in the United States. Their work includes search and arrest warrants, high-risk criminal investigations, undercover operations, surveillance operations, and protective service operations. Team members are specially trained ATF special agents who may serve full or part time. They often serve in various roles such as crisis negotiators, team leaders, tactical operators, snipers, operator medics and canine handlers.

Members of ATF special agent ranks are issued the Glock 19M as their primary duty weapon and are trained in the use of, and issued, certain rifles and shotguns. The ATF Special Response Team (SRT) is armed with Colt M4 carbines and other firearms.

The ATF is organized as follows:

The ATF has 26 field offices across the nation in major cities. Those cities are: Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Charlotte, Chicago, Columbus (OH), Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Kansas City (MO), Los Angeles, Louisville, Miami, Nashville, New Orleans, New York City, Newark, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, Seattle, St. Paul, Tampa, and Washington, D.C. Also, there are field offices in different countries such as Canada, Mexico, El Salvador, Colombia, Iraq, and in the Caribbean.

ATF is responsible for regulating firearm commerce in the United States. The bureau issues Federal Firearms Licenses (FFL) to sellers and conducts firearms licensee inspections. The bureau is also involved in programs aimed at reducing gun violence in the United States, by targeting and arresting violent offenders who unlawfully possess firearms. ATF was also involved with the Youth Crime Gun Interdiction Initiative, which expanded tracing of firearms recovered by law enforcement and the ongoing Comprehensive Crime Gun Tracing Initiative. ATF also provides support to state and local investigators through the National Integrated Ballistic Identification Network (NIBIN) program.

In 2006, Congress made the ATF head subject to Senate confirmation; since then, only one nominee has not been blocked from heading the ATF in the Senate.

ATF's Comprehensive Crime Gun Tracing Initiative is the largest operation of its kind in the world. In FY07, ATF's National Tracing Center processed over 285,000 trace requests on guns for over 6,000 law enforcement agencies in 50 countries. ATF uses a Web-based system, known as eTrace, that provides law enforcement agencies with the capability to securely and electronically send trace requests, receive trace results, and conduct basic trace analysis in real time. Over 2,000 agencies and more than 17,000 individuals currently use eTrace, including over 33 foreign law enforcement agencies. Gun tracing provides information to federal, state, local, and foreign law enforcement agencies on the history of a firearm from the manufacturer (or importer), through the distribution chain, to the first retail purchaser. This information is used to link suspects to firearms in criminal investigations, identify potential traffickers, and detect in-state, interstate, and international patterns in the sources and types of crime guns. These results are then used to help the courts prosecute the offenders and attempt to clamp down on firearm crime.

ATF provides investigative support to its partners through the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network (NIBIN), which allows federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies to image and compare crime gun evidence. NIBIN currently has 203 sites. In FY07, NIBIN's 174 partner agencies imaged more than 184,000 bullets and casings into the database, resulting in over 5,200 matches that provided investigative leads.

With the passage of the Organized Crime Control Act (OCCA) in 1970, ATF took over the regulation of explosives in the United States, as well as prosecution of persons engaged in criminal acts involving explosives. One of the most notable investigations successfully conducted by ATF agents was the tracing of the vehicle used in the World Trade Center 1993 bombings, which led to the arrest of persons involved in the conspiracy.

ATF also enforces provisions of the Safe Explosives Act, passed after 9/11 to restrict the use/possession of explosives without a federal license to use them. ATF is considered to be the leading federal agency in most bombings that occur within the U.S., with exception to bombings related to international terrorism (investigated by the FBI).

ATF currently trains the U.S. military in evidence recovery procedures after a bombing. All ATF Agents are trained in post-blast investigation, however ATF maintains a cadre of approximately 150 highly trained explosive experts known as Certified Explosives Specialists (CES). ATF/CES Agents are trained as experts regarding Improvised Explosive Devices (IED's), as well as commercial explosives. ATF Agents work closely with state and local Bomb Disposal Units (bomb squads) within the United States.

A list of ATF directors since becoming a Bureau on July 1, 1972:

Some media outlets have criticized the ATF, even going so far as to call for the abolition of the agency. One such criticism leveled by Reason magazine's J.D. Tuccille stated, "The nicest thing you can say about the ATF is that it's an unserious and unaccountable bureaucracy. Often it's explicitly contemptible, such as during the Fast-and-Furious gun-walking scandal, and its setting up mentally disabled youths to take the fall during gun-and-drug stings. After those abuses of individual rights and public trust, the failings of the National Disposal Branch almost pale by comparison ... the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives should be abolished, and its employees sent into the world to seek honest jobs in the private sector, if anybody will have them."

Tuccille's primary reason for the complaint related to the mishandling of information and even security of firearms that led to the theft and sale of thousands of confiscated firearms by ATF personnel to private parties. Tuccille argued that if even a fraction of said activity had occurred at a gun store instead, the store would have promptly and swiftly been shut down by the ATF, but that the ATF is not held to the same standards that they hold FFL's, "You have to wonder what the ATF would say about a private facility that was ripped off for years on end by its own staffers and still failed to implement serious security measures after the fact. I expect that the consequences would be a bit more serious than a single arrest and then business as usual despite a tut-tutting reprimand."

The ATF has also received criticism involving financial corruption. In 2021, a whistleblower informed the public that the ATF was giving a 25% monetary bonus to at least 94 of its employees. The benefit is known as law enforcement availability pay, or LEAP, that was only reserved for "criminal investigators" who are on call and expected to work unscheduled, additional hours. It was noted by the whistleblower that administrative officials were receiving this benefit, despite not being classified as criminal investigators.

While the ATF is prohibited by law from having a gun registry, critics have noted that the ATF still maintains a gun registry. Critics argue that documents obtained through FOIA requests found that the ATF "is maintaining a digital, searchable, centralized registry of guns and gun owners in violation of various federal prohibitions." The critics also note that the ATF processed and digitized 50,000,000 records of gun dealers who went out of business in FY 2021.