You’d think that if a couple of high-ranking government officials at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives got caught red-handed misclassifying administrative desk jobs as high-risk law enforcement roles (hello, taxpayer-funded pay raises!), there would be consequences. But no, under the Biden administration, there were promotions.
Senators Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst aren’t exactly lighting their hair on fire over nothing. Their letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi and Acting ATF Director Daniel Driscoll lays out a detailed, damning paper trail of mismanagement, misconduct, and plain old government fraud—backed up by not one, but two federal investigations.
According to internal audits by both the Office of Personnel Management and the ATF’s own Internal Affairs Division, supervisory staff at ATF knowingly violated federal directives to reclassify admin jobs into law enforcement positions. Why? To rake in the higher salaries and benefits reserved for actual law enforcement officers.
Im exposing Biden-era ATF bureaucrats 4defrauding taxpayers 2the tune of MILLIONS OF $$+falsely certifying gov docs+retaliating agnst WBs If heads dont roll NOTHING changes AG Bondi shld hold thm accountable&end ATFs fraudulent waste Thx Sen Ernst 4joining me 2seek accountability
— Chuck Grassley (@ChuckGrassley) May 12, 2025
But the audacity doesn’t stop there. These same ATF officials reportedly retaliated against the brave souls who tried to blow the whistle. That’s right—the folks who stood up and said, “Hey, this might be illegal,” were the ones punished, while the ringleaders got rewarded. Lisa Boykin and Ralph Bittelari, the two names called out in the senators’ letter, allegedly knew the entire scheme was in violation of OPM’s classification standards. Bittelari even tried to hide one unauthorized promotion by going around the proper channels and submitting it straight to payroll.
And yet, instead of facing so much as a demotion, these bureaucrats were shuffled up the ladder. Boykin, despite her “lack of candor” (a polite way of saying she wasn’t exactly truthful) during the internal investigation, landed a top role as chief diversity officer. Because of course—nothing screams accountability like a well-timed DEI promotion. Later, her title was quietly rebranded to “Senior Executive.” Meanwhile, Bittelari became a senior advisor in the Justice Department and then acting deputy director of human resources at JMD. You can’t make this up.
Let’s be clear: these aren’t some rogue interns. These are senior bureaucrats within an already controversial federal agency. The ATF has long been in the hot seat for its overreach and opaque internal culture. And now we learn that while average Americans tighten their belts to deal with inflation, the ATF was handing out inflated salaries to office workers playing dress-up as federal agents.
The ATF’s $20M+ misclassification scam under Biden’s watch epitomizes bureaucratic rot. Taxpayers bankrolled enhanced salaries for 91 paper-pushers masquerading as law enforcement while whistleblowers got silenced. Grassley and Ernst are right—accountability starts with clawing…
— DOGEai (@dogeai_gov) May 12, 2025
Grassley and Ernst are demanding answers—and rightly so. They want DOJ’s plan for corrective action on their desks by May 23. Good luck getting that from an agency that won’t even comment when reporters come calling. The Justice Department? Mum. ATF? Radio silence. Transparency doesn’t seem to be in the vocabulary over there.
Here’s the bottom line: if whistleblower retaliation, illegal salary schemes, and wanton disregard for federal law don’t get you fired—but instead get you a corner office and a bump in pay—then what exactly does? It’s hard not to see this whole debacle as the inevitable result of a culture where loyalty to the progressive narrative outranks actual job performance, where covering up misdeeds is easier than cleaning them up, and where the taxpayer is always the last to know and the first to foot the bill.
