Days after the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives disposed of $600,000 worth of drones it had never flown, an ATF unit spent another $15,000 to purchase more drones that have also remained on the ground.
ATF officials said the six drones they purchased between September 2011 and September 2012 were found to have “technological limitations” once the agency actually tested them, the Department of Justice inspector general found.
For example, ATF discovered one of the drone models used a battery that lasted just 20 minutes, rendering it “unsuitable for surveillance.” Another drone model — this one costing $315,000 — “was never operable due to multiple technical defects.”
A smaller, $90,000 drone was deemed “too difficult to use reliably in operations” after testing.
ATF suspended its drone program and donated all six of its drones to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service free of charge in June 2014.
But less than a week later, ATF’s National Response Team bought five small commercial drones for $15,000 “to help document fire and explosion crime scenes.”
Officials from that unit told the inspector general that, aside from one brief flight in July 2014 to survey the aftermath of a Louisiana apartment fire, the team never launched the fleet and halted its drone program altogether after discovering they needed certifications to legally operate the aircrafts.
ATF “should have communicated its decision to suspend [drone] activities across the entire agency,” the report said.
The inspector general said he was “troubled” by the contracting process that allowed ATF to spend more than half a million dollars on three different types of drones without realizing that none of them could be used for the intended purposes.
Justice’s watchdog also discovered agency branches had tapped the Department of Homeland Security for drone support without documentation because the Justice Department had no policies that required officials to keep tabs on the use of its drones
U.S. Customs and Border Protection records showed the Justice Department had used its drones 95 times between 2010 and 2013, although the flight records did not indicate how involved Justice branches were in the operations.
For example, inspector general interviews with agency staff found one instance in which ATF requested a series of border patrol drone flights so it could secure a search warrant in a gun-running investigation along the Canadian border.
In other cases, Justice branches, including the FBI, Drug Enforcement Agency and ATF, were simply part of a joint task force spanning several agencies that eventually employed a drone flight.
The watchdog warned that by not tracking its reliance on the drones of other agencies, Justice Department officials hampered their ability to determine how many, if any, additional drones it would need in the future.
Go here to read the full Justice Department inspector general report.
