Trump administration quietly abandons plan to merge ATF and DEA after pressure from both sides of gun debate

By Evan Perez, Hannah Rabinowitz, Holmes Lybrand, CNN

(CNN) — After pushback from both gun rights and gun control groups, the Trump administration has quietly abandoned its plan to merge the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives into the Drug Enforcement Administration, according to people briefed on the matter.

The decision comes as the White House works to secure Senate confirmation for Robert Cekada, who is nominated as director of the ATF. The agency has struggled with lengthy leadership vacuums amid the political turbulence that comes with regulating guns in the United States.

If confirmed, Cekada would be only the third leader, and the first in a Republican administration, to win Senate approval in the 20 years since the post became subject to Senate confirmation.

Cekada currently serves as deputy ATF director and is a 21-year veteran of the agency. The current acting director, Daniel Driscoll, also serves as army secretary, and while he was initially viewed as a skeptic of agency, he has become a champion of its violent crime work, according to people briefed on the matter.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche announced plans last year to merge ATF into the DEA, a proposal that would require Congressional budgetary approval and is part of the early administration-wide effort to shrink the size of federal government agencies.

But it was a proposal that had surfaced several other times over the years, as administrations have wrestled with what to do with an agency that is often buffeted by the politics surrounding gun rights issues. Joe Biden, when he was vice president, floated the idea in discussions about a task force that was set up to tackle mass shootings and gun crime in the Obama administration.

Officials involved in the proposal told CNN at the time of Blanche’s proposal that the two agencies had different missions — ATF is tasked with investigating violent crime, gun trafficking, arson and bombings, while DEA agents enforce the nation’s drug laws — but they naturally went hand-in-hand.

“Where there are drugs there are usually guns, and where there are guns there are usually drugs,” one of the officials previously told CNN.

The effort was re-affirmed in June, when Justice Department officials suggested eliminating the ATF “as a separate component, with its functions merged into the Drug Enforcement Administration,” leaving the DEA as “a single component that will address violent crime, drug enforcement, and crimes relating to firearms” in their budget proposal.

Administration officials’ expectations that pro-Trump gun-rights groups would welcome the plans were dashed almost immediately.

Some conservative and gun-rights groups have long called for the ATF’s abolishment but raised concerns that a merger with another agency would empower the agency’s gun-related efforts, not weaken them. The MAGA groups want ATF gone and the laws it enforces repealed. Giving its powers to another agency makes things worse, a gun rights source told CNN.

“Regulating guns is a hot potato. Everyone is for eradicating illegal drugs. Not everyone is for gun regulation,” one person involved in the Trump administration discussions that followed the Blanche memo told CNN.

Democrats and left-leaning gun control groups also decried the plan as an attempt to sideline ATF and harm efforts to reduce gun violence. But at the White House, the backlash from conservatives froze any momentum for the merger. Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff, was initially in favor of merging the agencies but later came to advocate for the ATF’s role in crime-fighting efforts in cities, a top priority for the president, people briefed on the matter said.

“At some point, no one seemed to want to own the idea of a merger,” the person involved in the administration’s discussions told CNN.

Pro-gun groups like the Firearms Policy Coalition warned that merging the two law enforcement groups would create an “authoritarian ‘super-agency’ with the combined powers to wage the failed war on drugs and enforce unconstitutional federal gun control laws against all Americans, not just violent criminals and drug cartels.”

“This would be a DISASTER for gun owners and the Second Amendment,” the pro-gun rights group Gun Owners of America wrote on social media when the plans were initially reported early last year. “Combining ATF with other federal law enforcement agencies will only supercharge its unconstitutional attacks on the right to keep and bear arms.”

An ATF representative declined to comment for this story.

Sources inside ATF told CNN that while there was an initial panic over what would happen if the plan to combine the two agencies came to fruition, those fears quickly dissipated as time went on without any logistical updates of how, or when, the merger would take place.

“We’ve been operating as if that’s off the table for months now,” one law enforcement official told CNN. “Everyone is just like, ‘that’s a funny little thing they tried to do. Let’s just keep moving.’”

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