Paul, the chairman and founder of RPI, proceeded to comment in his speech that, with the number of armed federal employees approaching 60,000, the Secretary of the Interior was pushing for even the Bureau of Land Management to be armed.

With the continuing rise of SWAT over the following 16 years, the number of armed US government employees continued to grow. According to the bulletin Federal Law Enforcement Officers, 2008 of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, by September of 2008 “federal agencies employed approximately 120,000 full-time law enforcement officers who were authorized to make arrests and carry firearms in the United States,” with 255 of them working for BLM.