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Washington.- As part of its plan to cut the budget of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), the U.S. President Donald Trump's government wants to modify fifty of its regulations, which includes simplifying and making the background check more flexible to buy weapons.
According to reports this Wednesday from several US media outlets, the controversial Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE) has been sending personnel to review the operation of the ATF, from which it wants to eliminate about 540 of its inspectors, two-thirds of the total. Also review about 50 of its regulations, which includes, for example, the destruction of files of firearm owners after 20 years (currently they must be kept permanently) or extend the background check period prior to the purchase of a firearm from 30 to 60 days. This all seeks to reduce the volume of bureaucracy that this office, which depends on the Department of Justice, carries, which has already proposed a 25% budget reduction for the ATF for the next fiscal year, which begins in October. The Attorney General, Pam Bondi, has even proposed merging the ATF with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). These bureaucratic cutback measures increase the risk of creating loopholes regarding the background and data of people who own and want to buy weapons, according to gun control associations.You may be interested in: More than 15,700 deaths from firearms are counted in the United States so far this year
And to this is added the plan to simplify form 4473 - the one required by the ATF to initiate the background check process - from the current seven pages to just three, as reported by The Washington Post. According to the latest data from the NGO Gun Violence Archive, since the beginning of the year, 7,358 people have died in the U.S. in incidents involving firearms and 13,203 have been injured, while 192 mass shootings have occurred, a term that includes a minimum of four people injured or killed, not counting the aggressor. Among the victims, 503 adolescents (between 12 and 17 years old) are counted among the deceased since the beginning of 2025, while 1,424 have been injured.
