America’s “deep state” now has more agents with firearms than the United States Marine Corps has soldiers. Last month, Rep. Matt Gaetz drew attention to this issue on Fox News, noting that the Internal Revenue Service has spent $725,000 on ammunition just this year. “Call me old-fashioned, but I thought the heaviest artillery an irs agent would need would be a calculator,” Gaetz said on Jesse Watters’s prime-time show. “I imagine the irs in green eyeshades and cubicles, not busting doors down and emptying Glock clips on our fellow Americans.”

Yet the irs is indeed busting down doors and arresting citizens with its own “swat teams.” It has stockpiled 4,500 guns and 5 million rounds of ammunition for this purpose, and it’s not the only federal agency doing so. A December 2020 report from American Transparency highlights how 103 executive agencies outside the Department of Defense spent $2.7 billion on guns, ammunition and military equipment between 2006 and 2019. The Department of Veterans Affairs spent $11.6 million on guns, ammunition, body armor, chemical weapons and military supplies. The Animal and Plant Inspection Service spent $3.9 million on rifles, ammunition, dart guns, night-vision equipment, unmanned aircraft and the like. Even the Railroad Retirement Board spent $50,088 on guns, ammunition and similar gear (though train robberies aren’t much of a problem these days).