The Washington Post broke a major story this morning, and it is genuinely good news for gun owners and the Second Amendment. The Trump administration — working through DOGE, the Department of Justice, and now artificial intelligence — is targeting a 50 percent cut to federal regulations across the entire Code of Federal Regulations. And the ATF is squarely in the crosshairs, with upward of 50 ATF-specific regulations already identified for revision or elimination.
This is exactly the kind of structural reform that matters. Not a court win here, a press release there — but a systematic dismantling of the unaccountable regulatory apparatus that has been the real engine of gun control for decades.
The Enemy Has Always Been the Bureaucracy
Let me be direct: the greatest threat to the Second Amendment is not Congress passing a new gun ban. Congress has to pass bills, hold votes, face elections. The real threat has always been unelected bureaucrats at agencies like the ATF who can rewrite the rules on their own, without a vote, without accountability, and with near-zero ability for ordinary Americans to push back.
Congress passes a statute giving the ATF authority over, say, defining “engaging in the business” of dealing firearms. Then unelected officials promulgate regulations stretching it far beyond congressional intent, sweeping up ordinary gun owners and small dealers in their net. You either comply or face the full weight of the federal government.
That is not a free country. That is petty administrative tyranny — and it has been the operating model at the ATF for decades.
What DOGE and AI Are Actually Doing
According to the Washington Post reporting, DOGE has built what it calls the “DOGE AI Deregulation Decision Tool.” The tool analyzes the roughly 200,000 regulations in the Code of Federal Regulations and compares each one against the actual congressional statutes that authorized it. The question is brutally simple: does this regulation have statutory authority, or did unelected bureaucrats make it up?
The goal is to identify 100,000 regulations — half the CFR — that can be cut or trimmed, with agencies completing their lists by September 1.
At the ATF specifically, the reporting indicates more than 50 regulations are already in the pipeline for overhaul. Among the changes reportedly on the table: extending the validity of an NICS background check from 30 to 60 days (so a lawful buyer who doesn’t complete a purchase immediately doesn’t have to run the whole check again), reducing the Form 4473 from seven pages down to four, and allowing FFLs to destroy certain records after 20 years rather than keeping them indefinitely. These are not trivial paperwork tweaks. They are direct rollbacks of regulatory burdens that had no compelling law-enforcement justification.
On top of that, the DOJ and ATF formally repealed the Enhanced Regulatory Enforcement Policy — Biden’s “zero tolerance” rule used to revoke FFL licenses over minor paperwork errors. That policy was a weapon aimed at the licensed firearms industry, and it is gone.
Robert Leider and the Personnel Revolution at ATF
None of this works without the right people in the right seats. Earlier this year, Attorney General Pam Bondi appointed Robert Leider as ATF’s new Chief Counsel and Assistant Director. Leider is a Second Amendment legal scholar, a former Antonin Scalia Law School professor at George Mason University, and a former law clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas.
Too many people overlook the personnel dimension. It is not enough to have a pro-Second Amendment president if the agency’s lawyers are still ideological holdovers. When the ATF’s top lawyer has devoted his career to defending the Second Amendment, the legal culture changes. The “clever” regulatory interpretations that once sailed through internal review get stopped at the source.
Personnel is policy. Robert Leider at ATF chief counsel is a very big deal.
AI Bias and the Integrity of the Tool
There is one concern worth addressing: can we trust an AI to do this analysis in a neutral way? We have all seen how AI systems trained on left-leaning data quietly embed ideological assumptions in their outputs.
The Trump administration addressed this directly. On July 23, the White House released its AI Action Plan — “Winning the Race” — along with three executive orders, including one titled “Preventing Woke AI in the Federal Government.” The order requires federal AI systems to adhere to ideological neutrality, banning DEI frameworks and mandating transparency.
That is the right principle. And for this specific task — comparing statutory text against regulatory text to determine whether authority exists — AI is actually well-suited. It is a structured legal question, not a values judgment. The tool is asking whether bureaucrats had the legal authority to write the rule. That is the right question.
What This Means for Gun Owners
The bottom line: the Trump administration is using every available lever — executive action, personnel appointments, and now AI-accelerated regulatory review — to dismantle the administrative apparatus that has functioned as a shadow gun-control regime for decades. Fifty-plus ATF regulations on the chopping block. Five hundred–plus ATF inspector positions being reduced. The zero-tolerance FFL revocation policy gone. A genuine Second Amendment scholar running the agency’s legal office.
I have been arguing for years that the real war over the Second Amendment is fought in the regulatory weeds, not just in federal courtrooms. For the first time in a very long time, the people with the power to clean up those weeds are doing exactly that.
This article is based on analysis by Professor Mark W. Smith, constitutional attorney and Host of the Four Boxes Diner 2nd Amendment channel. Watch the original video here. This does not constitute legal advice.