What do the IRS, NASA, the EPA, and HHS have in common?
They're all heavily armed at the expense of the American taxpayer.
According to a shocking new report from Open the Books, non-military federal agencies are bristling with firepower -- and no one quite knows why.
Here are a few highlights:
- There are more non-DOD federal employees with firearms (200,000+) than there are U.S. Marines (186,000).
- The Internal Revenue Service has 2,159 “Special Agents” and spent $21.3 million on guns, ammunition and military-style equipment between fiscal years 2006 and 2019. The agency stockpiled 4,500 guns and five million rounds of ammunition.
- The Office of Inspector General at HHS owns 1,300 guns including one shotgun, five submachine guns, and 189 automatic firearms. Over the last eight years, the HHS has purchased four million rounds of ammunition.
- The Social Security Administration has a stockpile of 800,000 rounds of ammunition.
- The Environmental Protection Agency just spent $61,650 purchasing “body armor systems” for 137 special agents. Their gun locker includes 867,000 rounds of ammunition and 600 guns.
High on their own power, pencil-pushing bureaucrats claim they need military-style weapons to enforce the rules and policies they create without approval from We the People. The vast majority of the rules we live under aren't written by Congress, the people's representatives. They're written by heavily armed bureaucrats with almost no oversight and little accountability.
This doesn't sound like democracy to us. Only Congress should have the power to create laws, and only true law enforcement agencies like those in the Department of Defense should have the power to enforce those laws. We don't need to be wasting taxpayer money purchasing sophisticated weaponry for IRS agents.
It's time to take the bureaucrats down a notch. By calling an Article V Convention of States, the people and the states can limit the power -- and the budgets -- of every federal agency. A Convention of States has the power under Article V of the Constitution to propose constitutional amendments that limit the scope and jurisdiction of the federal government. These amendments can reduce the budgets and staffs of many agencies and eliminate others altogether.
The federal government's power and size has grown far beyond what the Founders intended. It's time to put the bureaucrats back into their constitutional box, and the only way to do it is with a Convention of States.
Sign the petition below to get involved!
