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[BasedPolitics] When Congress authorized $80 billion this year to beef up Internal Revenue Service enforcement and staffing, Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy invoked the language of war to warn that “Democrats’ new army of 87,000 IRS agents will be coming for you.”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 ordinary taxpayers. 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.
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.
When asked about the need for such lethal material, agency officials typically speak only in general terms about security concerns. Agencies contacted by RealClearInvestigations from HHS to EPA declined to provide, or said they did not have, comprehensive statistics on how often their firearms are used, or details on how they conduct armed operations.
Abigail Blanco, an economics professor at the University of Tampa, and the co-author of “Tyranny Comes Home: The Domestic Fate of U.S. Militarism,” told RCI that the militarization of the federal government appears to track closely with the increased militarization of local police.
Blanco cites data in her book from criminologist Peter Kraska, who found that about 20% of small-town police departments had SWAT-style teams in the mid-1980s, deployed about 3,000 times annually. After the creation of a federal program in 1997 to arm local police with surplus military equipment, about 90% of small-town police departments had SWAT teams by the early 2000s and those units were being deployed 45,000 times annually. Current estimates suggest those SWAT teams are deployed as many as 80,000 times a year.
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?”
While it’s hardly a new complaint that federal bureaucracies are overstepping their rulemaking authority and usurping congress’ legislative powers, the idea that executive agencies are broadly empowered to effectively create their own laws and go out and enforce them with armed federal agents is another matter.
“So many of the regulations that can be enforced at the point of a gun have almost nothing to do with what people would normally call dangerous crime, that would be the kind of thing where you might want armed agents there,” said Burrus. “And especially coming from agencies such as the EPA and other agencies that are more quality-of-life agencies dealing with regulatory infractions, rather than involved in solving real crimes.”
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.
“If there’s a dispute the EPA has with a rancher where they want to come in with armed agents, you’re much better off coming in with a local sheriff who is probably familiar with the person in the situation,” says Peter Schweizer, president of the Government Accountability Institute. “With the sheriff you have an independent person if something goes wrong. Otherwise, you’re taking the word of this government agency, where the law enforcement mechanism is the same as the bureaucracy that’s alleging the violations. It’s a real opportunity for damaging people’s rights in a major way.”