On July 4, 2025, President Trump signed into law the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” passed by the Republican-controlled Congress. While the budget bill provides tax breaks for the richest Americans and cuts Medicare, SNAP, and clean energy funding, it also contains a provision repealing the $200 taxes required to purchase or make silencers, short-barreled rifles and shotguns, and “any other weapon” (AOW) regulated by the National Firearms Act (NFA), making it easier for people to obtain these dangerous — and once highly regulated — items.
The move is yet another handout to the gun industry by the Trump administration in the midst of plummeting gun sales. In May, the administration effectively legalized forced-reset triggers for AR-15s and other weapons, allowing companies like Rare Breed Triggers to sidestep NFA regulations on machine guns. The administration has also ushered in a “New Era of Reform” at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) that limits the agency’s ability to oversee the industry.
undoing the nfa
Enacted in 1934, the NFA was designed to “curtail, if not prohibit” weapons frequently used in “gangland crimes of that era,” including fully automatic machine guns; silencers, which make it difficult for bystanders to recognize that a gun has been fired and identify where the gunshots came from; short-barreled rifles and shotguns, which are much more powerful than handguns while being just as easy to conceal on one’s person; and AOWs, a category that includes guns disguised as other objects, such as pen guns and cane guns.
For over 90 years, the NFA has required that anyone interested in buying or building one of these weapons first submit an application to the ATF along with their fingerprints, a passport-style photo, and a $200 tax stamp before undergoing an enhanced background check. As the ATF notes, the $200 tax was “considered quite severe” in 1934 “to carry out Congress’ purpose to discourage or eliminate transactions in these firearms,” though it was never raised or adjusted to account for inflation. In today’s dollars, the figure would be well over $4,700.
But after January 1, 2026, those taxes will no longer be required for silencers, short-barreled firearms, or AOWs, making them significantly easier to obtain — jeopardizing public safety and resulting in an estimated $1.7 billion loss in tax revenue over the next decade.
The move is the latest attempt by the gun industry to chip away at the NFA. While NFA applicants previously had to be approved by the ATF and the chief law enforcement officers (CLEOs) in their areas, in 2016 — after lobbying from the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), the gun industry’s trade association — the ATF ruled that applicants only had to provide copies of their forms to CLEOs. The NSSF also lobbied for the ATF’s revamped “eForms” application system, which has led to dramatically faster approval times.
budget bill timeline
Previous attempts to deregulate NFA items through legislation have largely been unsuccessful on the federal level. But earlier this spring, U.S. Representative Andrew Clyde of Georgia, who owns gun shops that sell NFA items, fought for the House’s original budget draft to include language that would have removed silencers from the NFA’s regulations. According to The Reload, gun groups like the National Rifle Association, Gun Owners of America (GOA), and American Suppressor Association (ASA) then fought for Senate Republicans to go even further with their draft of the bill, which would have deregulated silencers, short-barreled firearms, and AOWs entirely. The groups “argued the NFA is a tax, and the registration requirement [and] other regulations in it only exist to enforce the tax.”
After the Senate Parliamentarian ruled that the draft violated the Byrd Rule, which limits reconciliation bills to budget-related provisions, senators proposed a version simply repealing the taxes on those items. It passed the Senate on July 1 and the House on July 3, and Trump signed it the following day.
In a statement, the NSSF acknowledged that it would have preferred to deregulate silencers through legislation (like the Hearing Protection Act, discussed here) but nonetheless applauded Congress for “remov[ing] a major barrier to more law-abiding Americans fully exercising their Second Amendment rights.”
Repealing the tax provisions may have been a backdoor attempt to invalidate the NFA. After the House passed the budget bill, GOA immediately announced that they were filing a lawsuit — dubbed the “One Big Beautiful Lawsuit” — along with the Silencer Shop, SilencerCo, Palmetto State Armory, and others to remove silencers and short-barreled firearms from the NFA, arguing that “once the tax is reduced to $0, the constitutional justification for the law collapses.”
The NRA, ASA, Firearms Policy Coalition, and Second Amendment Foundation announced that they would file their own lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the NFA. In a joint statement, the groups applauded Trump’s budget bill, which “serve[s] as a critical step towards our ultimate goal of dismantling the NFA once and for all.”