Why Do Federal Bureaucrats Need So Much Firepower?

If you worry that one day armed federal agents might kick down your door, you probably assume that they would at least come from a law enforcement agency. But as it turns out, they might just be tax collectors.

That revelation comes from a newly updated report compiled by Open the Books, a government watchdog organization. It follows up on revelations first made by Open the Books founder and CEO Adam Andrzejewski in a 2016 Wall Street Journal op-ed.

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. As the report put it, “There are now more federal agents with arrest and firearm authority (200,000) than U.S. Marines (186,000).”

The IRS in particular has spent $35.2 million on guns and ammo since 2006. Of that, according to a spreadsheet Andrzejewski provided to Reason, over $9.75 million has been spent just since 2020, including more than $2.2 million on ammunition, $474,000 on rifles, $463,000 on shotguns, and $1.17 million on ballistic shields, plus another $1.3 million on “various other gear for criminal investigation agents.” According to a December 2018 report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), in 2017–18, the agency had 4,461 guns and 5,047,300 rounds of ammunition in inventory.

The existence of armed IRS agents is not new information: Last year, the Inflation Reduction Act apportioned $80 billion in new funding for the agency, including $45.7 billion in “enforcement,” estimated to support as many as 87,000 new hires. When some Republicans recoiled at the idea of tens of thousands of armed tax collectors, fact-checkers helpfully pointed out that only one division of the agency, IRS Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI), employs special agents who carry guns. IRS-CI has been around since 1919, charged with enforcing crimes like money laundering and narcotics trafficking. An IRS-CI