The Militarization Of The U.S. Executive Agencies

Biden admin continues arming more federal agents than members of the U.S. military: Why?

JD Heyes 

According to a report by The Federalist, the Biden regime appears to be arming more agents than U.S. Marines, adding that “the idea that agencies are empowered to effectively create their own laws and go out and enforce them with armed federal agents should be alarming.”

“Congress authorized $80 billion this year to beef up Internal Revenue Service enforcement and staffing, Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy warned that ‘Democrats’ new army of 87,000 IRS agents will be coming for you.'” wrote Mark Hemingway for the outlet.

“A video quickly went viral racking up millions of views, purporting to show a bunch of clumsy bureaucrats receiving firearms training, prompting alarm that the IRS would be engaged in military-style raids of taxpayers,” he continued.

“The GOP claims were widely attacked as exaggerations — since the video, though from the IRS, didn’t show official agent training — but the criticism has shed light on a growing trend: the rapid arming of the federal government.”

Hemingway goes on to cite a report issued in 2021 by the watchdog organization Open The Books, “The Militarization of The U.S. Executive Agencies,” which noted that more than 200,000 federal agents now have been authorized to carry firearms and make arrests, noting that currently, there are only 186,000 Americans serving in the 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),” the report says. “Nearly $1 billion ($944.9 million) was spent between fiscal years 2015 and 2019 alone.”

Open The Books also reported that of all agencies, the Department of Health and Human Resources has 1,300 firearms including a single shotgun, five automatic carbines, and 189 automatic weapons of all kinds. Even NASA has armed agents; the country’s space agency has a SWAT team with all the associated weaponry, along with breeching shotguns, machine guns, and armored vehicles.

Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency now has drones, radar equipment, night vision goggles, and GPS trackers — along with a stockpile of guns.

“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’s 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,” Hemingway wrote.

He added that, according to the watchdog report, more than 100 Executive Branch agencies have investigators who carry firearms, and what’s more, there isn’t an independent authority that monitors or tracks the use of force across all federal agencies.

RealClearInvestigations contacted agencies from the HHS, EPA, and others refused to provide or said they didn’t have up-to-date stats on how often firearms in their possession were used or details on how armed operations were carried out.

“I would be amazed if that data exists in any way,” Trevor Burrus, a research fellow in constitutional and criminal law at the libertarian Cato Institute, told Hemingway “Over the years of working on this, it’s quite shocking how much they try to not have their stuff tracked on any level.”

Of course, refusing to track the number of firearms or how each agency is using them means that the federal government has plausible deniability for those uses.

What we do know is this: The more guns the government has, the more necessary it becomes for private citizens to protect and defend their Second Amendment rights. Any federal entity pushing gun control while arming up reveals they are intent on becoming tyrannical.