WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) today sent a letter to Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) Deputy Director Robert Cekada following up on his Senate Judiciary Committee testimony last month with further questions regarding the Bureau’s plan to hire more agents, if it will address the Supreme Court’s decision in Bondi v. VanDerStok, as well as questions related to gun owner privacy. Sen. Cornyn’s questions are below, and full text of the letter is here.

1. At your confirmation hearing, you stated that the ATF is in the process of hiring up to 800 additional ATF agents. However, Congress cut ATF’s budget in its last two funding bills. Can you please provide information on how ATF plans to hire these new agents, where funding will come from, and who authorized the hiring plan?
2. In 2022, the Biden administration issued a Final Rule on the “Definition of ‘Frame or Receiver’ and Identification of Firearms.” See 87 Fed. Reg. 24652. After multiple parties challenged the legality of the Rule, the Supreme Court upheld it in Bondi v. VanDerStok, 604 U.S. 458 (2025). Unfortunately, the Court’s opinion failed to fully understand the nuanced legal issues at play in the case, and left gun owners without any real guidance on what types of privately made firearm products are legal. Are you committed to repealing or otherwise fixing the nightmare scenario gun owners face because of this opinion in a timely manner?
3. In 2021, ATF revealed to Congressman Michael Cloud that it had 920,664,765 records of guns and gun owners contained in a digital, searchable registry. ATF has not responded to Representative Cloud’s request for an updated record request for over a year, and we suspect that there are now over a billion records in ATF’s database, despite Congress banning gun registries under 18 U.S.C. § 926(a). Last Congress, former ATF Director Dettelbach testified that this database is not a registry because ATF pays Adobe Acrobat extra money to remove search-by-name functionality. Is this database an illegal gun registry? What steps do you plan to take to address this registry? Will ATF respond to Congressman Cloud’s inquiry?
4. Until recently, firearms dealers were required to keep certain records of firearms transactions for twenty years. President Biden, however, changed ATF regulations to require that firearm transaction records be kept permanently—effectively creating a registry of every gun sold from 2002 onwards. However, the national time-to-crime is less than ten years, and ATF reports very few traces which implicate firearm records that are older than twenty years. Do you oppose the Biden Administration’s permanent gun record keeping scheme? What will you do to ensure gun owner privacy?