by Joe Wolverton, II, J.D., The New American:
“He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.” — Declaration of Independence
The IRS, the U.S. Postal Service, the EPA, the Department of Health and Human Services, and more than 100 other federal agencies (none of which operate under the aegis of the Department of Defense) have “spent $3.7 billion on guns, ammunition, and military-style equipment,” according to a new report on the arming of the bureaucracy.
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The report was compiled by Open the Books, and discloses an astonishing amount of ammunition and war-fighting equipment being procured by these alphabet agencies. Here’s a brief synopsis of the report published by Reason:
The report alleges that since 2006, 103 federal agencies not contained within the Department of Defense (DOD) have collectively “spent $3.7 billion on guns, ammunition, and military-style equipment” (all numbers adjusted for inflation). Of those 103 agencies, 27 are “traditional law enforcement [entities] under the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).”
That leaves 76 agencies—including the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)—without a direct law enforcement purview.
Of particular note, the report reveals that “There are now more federal agents with arrest and firearm authority (200,000) than U.S. Marines (186,000).”
These agents — all of whom are beyond the reach of the American people and are completely unaccountable to them — are armed and have been given authority to use those weapons, and they outnumber the Marine Corps! Think about that.
What could be the purpose for the equipping of IRS and EPA agents — none of whom have even nominally a law enforcement mission — with such firepower and such, albeit unconstitutional, authority to use their military-grade guns and gear?
Take the Department of Health and Human Services. Consider this synopsis of the report published by Reason:
Since 2006, it has spent $154 million on “guns, ammunition, and military-style equipment.” According to a spreadsheet that [Adam] Andrzejewski [CEO of Open the Books] provided to Reason, since 2020, the HHS has spent over $427,000 on “tactical combat gear,” $247,000 on ammunition, $100,000 on “law enforcement weapons,” and $99,450 on a “virtual reality weapons simulator,” among other expenditures. This is all in addition to a $685,000 line item simply listed as “law enforcement equipment.”
With all that in materiel in mind, consider the mission statement as declared on the HHS website:
Fostering sound, sustained advances in the sciences underlying medicine, public health, and social services….
It seems contrary to reason that an agency with such a benign purpose would need to equip its agents with firepower and equipment that belongs in a battlefield, rather than a laboratory.
The question remains: Why?
When questioned by Congress or the press, officials of these agencies respond that such purchases are necessary for training purposes, as well as for responding to potential threats.
Potential threats from whom? The American people?
Why would the American people pose a threat to these agencies, unless these agencies were themselves a threat to the American people? And is government truly government by the consent of the governed if agents of the government are being armed and trained to force the people to obey their tyrannical will?
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