Mark Hemingway: More Federal Bureaucrats Than Marines Are Now Authorized To Carry Weapons

Apparently federal bureaucrats are facing a larger, more dangerous opposing force than US Marines are expected to eve face.

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.

Here's that video. I don't understand the "fact" check here -- the video is in fact from the IRS, but it's not an official training video? Then what is it?

Sounds like a b***shit denial to me, which of course the media and "fact" checkers take as the gold-standard final word.

A report issued last year by the watchdog group Open The Books, "The Militarization of The U.S. Executive Agencies," found that more than 200,000 federal bureaucrats now have been granted the authority to carry guns and make arrests -- more than the 186,000 Americans serving in the U.S. 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)," notes the report. "Nearly $1 billion ($944.9 million) was spent between fiscal years 2015 and 2019 alone."

The watchdog reports that the Department of Health and Human Services has 1,300 guns including one shotgun, five submachine guns, and 189 automatic firearms. NASA has its own fully outfitted SWAT team, with all the attendant weaponry, including armored vehicles, submachine guns, and breeching shotguns. The Environmental Protection Agency has purchased drones, GPS trackers, radar equipment, and night vision goggles, in addition to stockpiling firearms.

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' 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.

...

When asked about the need for such lethal materiel, 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.

...

"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?"

Andrzejewski said that when he asked HHS about its arsenal, the agency spoke only in general terms about the dangers employees faced. It did not detail an increase in threats or provide specific examples of cases where such weapons would be required.

Much more at the link.

Rep. Chip Roy highlighted Hemingway's article and suggested defunding these arm-the-angry-bureaucrats programs.

Jim Swift of The Bulwark, of course, immediately claimed that the Second Amendment is all about the right of federal bureaucrats to have the government buy guns for them, and that if you didn't believe that, you're not a True Conservative, Conserving Conservatism, like him and his Cruise Ship Swabbies at the Bulwark.

Below, "TIL" is an abbreviation for a sarcastic "Today I Learned."

Michael Anton wrote about Bill Kristol and his Gang of Grifters for American Greatness yesterday. He included background on one of AllahPundit's favorite people to link, Damon Linker, who turns out to be, get this, a fake conservative who wrote for First Things briefly and then quit in disgust when he discovered that they were conservative religious Catholics. Now he's a "moderate" who fights tooth and nail for Biden's "moderate" Police State.

posted by Ace at 12:22 PM

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