On Feb. 28, 1993, 70 agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives laid siege to the home of the Branch Davidians near Waco, Texas. By April, skirmishes with ATF and a fire resulted in the deaths of more than 80 men, women, and children.
Significant questions still linger about the events of the Waco siege—also known as the Waco massacre—but at the heart of the mystery lies a stark and troubling question: How did a federal investigation into alleged illegal weapons spiral into a catastrophic inferno that left over 80 people dead?
Waco lives on in infamy, but it is a flashpoint in a wider record of controversial behavior from the ATF. Incidents such as Ruby Ridge, Operation Fast and Furious, and the fatal shooting of Brian Malinowski in March 2024 continue to raise serious concerns about the agency’s strategies and use of force.
Rep. Eric Burlison, R-Mo., has introduced a bill to abolish the ATF. He joined “The Signal Sitdown” this week to break it down.
”Women and children were burned alive in a building all because the ATF believed that David Koresh and the people that lived there were changing the triggers to turn semi-automatic rifles to automatic,” Burlison said of the Waco massacre. “That’s what [the ATF] believed.”
“Nothing can justify going in and what happened to those people,” Burlison added. “I feel like they were absolutely innocent people.”
A long-time advocate of Second Amendment rights and ATF antagonist, Burlison has spoken to members of the Waco community who knew the Branch Davidians. “When you talk to people that live in that area, that knew them, sure they thought they were kind of a goofy group, but certainly nice people,” Burlison told The Daily Signal.
Though this all sounds antagonistic to law enforcement, the ATF is a different animal than your local cops that make up the thin blue line. “I will defend law enforcement all day because they’re the ones that are supposed to be defending our rights and our life, but when that very law enforcement becomes abusive, it becomes an institution that’s designed to take away our rights, they’re no longer living under the Constitution,” Burlison explained. “They’re a rogue agency, and the ATF has proven time and time again that they need to be reigned in.”
Burlison knows his legislation faces an uphill battle. Nevertheless, “I believe that we’ve moved the needle on this,” Burlison said. “Politics is about changing the Overton window, and when the Trump administration came in, and DOGE is looking for places to save money, this is a great place to save money.”
“In fact, it’s not that radical of an idea,” Burlison explained. “When you look back in the nineties, Bill Clinton and Al Gore, in their big proposal to eliminate departments, the ATF was one of the agencies.”
Many of the ATF’s law enforcement functions appear duplicative, he suggested. The result, according to Burlison, is that “the ATF just steps on everybody else.”
“It’s time that the agency get rolled into the FBI, which I was glad to see that Kash Patel has moved over a thousand of those employees over or eliminated those positions, and I’m glad to see that in Trump’s new budget that he’s cutting the agency by over 25%,” he said.
President Donald Trump’s budget proposal for FY 2026 would slash ATF funding from $1.625 billion to $1.2 billion. A senior White House official justified the proposed cuts, recently telling ABC News that the ATF has created “abusive regulatory decrees.”
Burlison said he hopes this could lead to an end to the agency.
“You could do to the ATF what they did to the Department of Education,” he said. “Eliminate the agency, but the core functions, the things that are necessary, you move the responsibility of those squarely in one other agency, in this case, the FBI.”
