Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner Credit: McClathchy Tribune

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A Journal Sentinel investigation uncovered mistakes and failures in an undercover sting in Milwaukee's Riverwest neighborhood by the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives – stolen guns, sensitive documents lost, wrong people charged and a burglary of the sting storefront. Go to section.

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The U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives would be eliminated under a bill in the works from U.S. Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.).

Citing ATF's recent operational failures and its overlap with other federal law enforcement, Sensenbrenner is preparing a bill to dissolve the agency and have existing agencies in the U.S. Justice Department take on its duties.

"By absorbing the ATF into existing law enforcement entities, we can preserve the areas where the ATF adds value for substantially less taxpayer money," Sensenbrenner said. "While searching for its mission, the ATF has been plagued by decades of high-profile blunders....We cannot afford to ignore clear changes that will greatly enhance the government's efficiency."

A new Government Accountability Office report on the ATF released Wednesday found an agency trying to redefine itself while struggling with high personnel turnover and problems tracking its own criminal investigations.

The GAO report is the latest in a series of documents and studies going back more than two decades that are critical of the agency's overlap with other law enforcement. At least two of those reports have called for the ATF to be dissolved and its responsibility folded into other federal agencies. The ATF received $12 billion from Congress between 2003 and 2013.

ATF spokeswoman Ginger Colbrun declined to comment on Sensenbrenner's proposal, saying she first needed to see a bill.

Abolishing the ATF is being considered on both sides of the political spectrum.

Policy analysts with the Center for American Progress, a nonpartisan but left-leaning Washington, D.C.-based think tank, said Tuesday the ATF needed restructuring and it made sense to blend it into the FBI.

"The FBI already has a significant role in violent crimes," said Arkadi Gerney, a senior fellow at the center who specializes in crime and gun policy and has studied the ATF. "Firearms are not a foreign concept to them."

The center recommended a merger between the agencies following the shootings in Newtown, Conn.

A merger could enhance the mission of enforcing federal gun laws and address struggles the ATF has faced in recent years and for decades, Gerney said.

He doesn't see the FBI as being as vulnerable to political influence and added that the agency hadn't been faced with the same kind of congressional micromanaging endured by ATF.

"FBI has a degree of independence from the political process that is notable and appreciated on both sides of the aisle," Gerney said. "It's not viewed as a political agency and is therefore given a lot of leeway to help it achieve its goals toward fighting crime."

And, although certainly not free of problems, the FBI has a more solid management structure, he said.

The agency has "built a culture and management systems to deal with complicated and challenging investigations and to mitigate risks," Gerney said.

The center is continuing to study the logistics of such a merger.

Roots of ATF

The ATF began as a revenue-collecting agency with roots reaching back to the 1880s. It enforced Prohibition-era laws, and with the passage of the 1968 Gun Control Act it became a separate agency.

Today, it has a dual role of regulating and collecting taxes on the industry under its umbrella and also acting as a law enforcement agency.

Congress has increasingly limited ATF's ability to regulate the gun dealers, for instance only allowing inspectors to visit dealers once a year and not requiring dealers to take annual inventory. These rules have allowed corrupt dealers to escape accountability.

The ATF has been on the chopping block before. It was considered for elimination during former President Ronald Reagan's term but was saved, in part, because gun rights groups didn't want its duties moving to another agency.

Under the Clinton Administration, a group studying how to cut government waste suggested folding ATF's law enforcement activities into existing Justice Department agencies and putting the agency's regulatory and revenue functions under the Internal Revenue Service. It also suggested folding the Drug Enforcement Administration into the FBI.

In 1993, Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) introduced a bill to eliminate the ATF. It did not pass. Representatives from Conyers' office did not return calls for comment Tuesday.

A decade later, ATF moved from the Treasury Department into the Justice Department. Around that time, a group studying federal law enforcement found that the ATF's missions to collect taxes and regulate private industry "did not contribute to effective enforcement of the nation's gun and explosives laws."

"ATF lacks a clear mission and sense of purpose because of the clash of disparate jurisdictional responsibilities," said the report by the Commission on the Advancement of Federal Law Enforcement. "This small agency has for more than 30 years attempted to reconcile the irreconcilable....The task of enforcing firearms and explosives laws can best be carried out in the FBI."

Subsequent reports by the GAO, the Justice Department inspector general and other agencies identified problems within ATF, including backlogs in inspecting gun dealers, problems in undercover cigarette-selling operations and turf battles between the FBI and ATF over who has jurisdiction over fires and explosions.

The new GAO report notes that ATF has been changing its mission in recent years, getting out of alcohol and tobacco cases and focusing on criminal organizations and violent crime. The agency has seen its personnel cut in recent years, and nearly half of its workforce is eligible to retire in four years.

The report also found that ATF has trouble tracking investigations into people who are able to illegally buy guns from federal firearms dealers, though the agency calls this a top priority.

The ATF also has been beset by operational problems in recent years, including the disastrous "Operation Fast and Furious," where agents in Phoenix stood by as thousands of assault rifles passed into the hands of criminals and ended up at murder scenes, including one where a U.S. border guard was killed.

More recently, a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel investigation uncovered a series of botched undercover storefront stings across the nation.

The agency used people with mental disabilities to promote operations and then arrested them; opened storefronts by schools and churches, boosting their arrest numbers and penalties; attracted juveniles with free video games and alcohol; paid inflated prices for guns, prompting people to buy new guns and quickly sell them to agents for a profit; allowed armed felons to leave their fake stores; and openly bought stolen goods, spurring burglaries in surrounding neighborhoods.

In Milwaukee, the ATF operation was burglarized, four of the wrong people were arrested and an agent's machine gun was stolen. It has not been recovered.

The reports led to a bipartisan call for accountability. The Justice Department inspector general is investigating the operations as well as the House Oversight Committee. Attorney General Eric Holder in April called the ATF's use of people with intellectual disabilities "ridiculous" and "absurd." He vowed that there will be accountability. As of yet, the agency has not said if anyone has been punished.

In a congressional hearing, ATF Director B. Todd Jones defended the agency, saying people with mental disabilities were not targeted. He said it was a mistake for agents to pay for two men, one with disabilities, to get tattoos promoting the ATF storefront on their necks. A federal judge ordered the ATF to pay for the removal.

The agency has stopped running the storefronts, and Jones vowed that they would not be done again unless they can be done correctly.

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