House Oversight Panel Sets Nov. 18 Hearing on ATF's 1.41 Billion Closed-Dealer Gun Records as 20-or-30-Year Retention Rule Pends

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s Subcommittee on Federal Law Enforcement has set a hearing for Nov. 18, 2026, at 2 p.m. in Room 2154 of the Rayburn House Office Building on “Oversight of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ Out-of-Business Records Retention Practices,” per the committee’s hearing notice. Rep. Clay Higgins of Louisiana chairs the subcommittee, with Rep. Greg Casar of Texas as ranking member, per its membership page, and the notice listed no witnesses as of Nov. 12.

The hearing follows a Sept. 24 letter to Attorney General Todd Blanche, copied to ATF Director Robert Cekada, that calls the closed-dealer records held at ATF’s Martinsburg, West Virginia, facility “an illegal national gun registry now containing 1,414,088,513 records of guns and gun owners” with “names, addresses, Social Security numbers, and the specific firearms purchased.” It says the holdings grew from roughly 920 million records in 2021 to more than 1.4 billion, cites the Firearm Owners’ Protection Act of 1986’s bar on “any system of registration of firearms, firearms owners, or firearms transactions,” and asks Blanche to order an independent investigation of the Martinsburg database, the verifiable destruction of records kept in violation of the 1986 act and the appropriations riders, and a final retention rule that complies with both. Sen. James Risch of Idaho led the letter, joined by Sens. Mike Crapo, Marsha Blackburn, Ted Budd, Tom Cotton, Steve Daines, Cindy Hyde-Smith and Pete Ricketts, per the copy posted by Hyde-Smith’s office.

When a licensed dealer closes without a successor, federal law requires it to send its transaction records, including Form 4473s and acquisition-and-disposition books, to ATF’s National Tracing Center. ATF’s May 6, 2026 proposed rule, RIN 1140-AA95, would replace indefinite retention with a fixed period of 20 or 30 years for dealers’ records and for the records the tracing center receives, and comments closed Aug. 4. The rule’s preamble says the center held about 1.3 billion images of records and was receiving about 6.8 million out-of-business records a month as of June 11, 2025, estimates that 500 million of those images are older than 20 years, and reports 614,995 traces in fiscal 2024.

Gun Owners of America and Gun Owners Foundation said in a June 2 comment that the two periods would not run concurrently, because the clock restarts when ATF receives a closed dealer’s records, so a record kept 30 years by a dealer could sit another 30 years at ATF, 60 years in all, and that any retention period over 20 years is a nonstarter under the 1986 act. The senators’ letter makes the same point, saying the rule would have dealers keep records for up to 30 years and then transfer them to ATF for another 30.

ATF has not published a final rule, and the subcommittee hearing is set for November 18, 2026.