Trump's ATF Keeps Biden's Ghost Gun Rule Intact

Trump's ATF just stabbed gun owners in the back.

Despite two years of promises to roll back Biden-era overreach, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives intends to keep Biden's 2022 frames and receivers rule alive — the same rule that redefined what counts as a firearm and gutted the homemade and 80% gun industry.

The agency had previously requested stays in two federal lawsuits — VanDerStok v. Bondi and Defense Distributed v. Bondi — claiming it needed time to draft a replacement regulation. Gun owners took that as a sign the rule was dead. They were wrong.

The ATF now plans to keep the Biden framework essentially intact rather than replace it with something narrower. That leaves law-abiding builders, hobbyists, and small manufacturers trapped under regulations a federal court already found legally suspect.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche's Justice Department owns this decision. The ATF doesn't act without DOJ cover, and right now DOJ is letting a Biden-era power grab stand on their watch.

Here's what this rule actually does: it empowers the ATF to classify unfinished components — parts that are not firearms under any plain reading of federal law — as regulated firearms. It's a bureaucratic rewrite of the Gun Control Act, accomplished without a single vote in Congress.

The federal lawsuits challenging this rule exist because the ATF exceeded its statutory authority. Federal courts agreed. Yet a Republican administration now defends the same legal monster the last one built.

Gun owners were promised regulatory relief. They were promised an ATF that would stay in its lane. Instead, the agency is circling the wagons around one of the most constitutionally aggressive rules it has ever issued.

Flood Acting AG Blanche's office with calls and demand the DOJ drop its defense of this rule entirely. Contact your House and Senate representatives and demand oversight hearings on ATF's decision to preserve Biden's regulatory legacy. The Second Amendment carries no asterisk for parts that haven't been assembled yet — and no bureaucracy gets to add one.