The "White House Petition" is just a fart in the wind. It means nothing. NOTHING. It's like starting a Facebook page dedicated to abolishing the ATF and getting 10,000 gun lovers to "like" it.
Here's a better proposal for a revenue-neutral reform of the NFA, which would not require any layoffs or shrinking the size of ATF's budget or closing any of the buildings they use. No layoffs for these federal employees:
-- Announce that all silencers, SBR, and SBS will have only one regulation under the NFA, and that is that any person buying or selling such a weapon in a private party transaction must make a receipt / bill of sale and send it to ATF within 10 days of the transfer of the weapon. That would be "registration" without any delay or hardship or loss of liberty to the parties. The registration form would be accompanied by a "recording fee" of $30 to cover the administrative costs.
(Keep in mind that without the NFA restrictions on transfers, the Forms, the Fingerprints, and without the $200 tax, a lot more of these kinds of NFA devices will be registered, and having hundreds of thousands of people pay $30 per item will generate more revenue than having ten thousand people pay $200.)
-- Take silencers, SBR's and SBS's out of any other NFA regulation or restriction, except the above registration and $30 tax.
Regulate them like handguns are regulated. Same rules for buying, selling, interstate transfers, etc.
-- Narrow the definition of "AOW" to mean only guns that are so fully disguised that even looking at one from a close distance, from multiple angles, would not reveal its nature as a weapon. So no more "vertical fore-grip" AOWs. No more "wallet holster that you can shoot through" AOW's (if you can see a 2" diameter hole in the holster for access to the gun's trigger, and you see the trigger and the tip of the muzzle when the holster is pointed your way, you know there's a gun in there.)
-- for true AOW's that meet the new definition, reduce the "making" tax to $5 for individuals, but $200 for any person or entity making such items for resale and engaging in that business. Keep the $5 transfer tax. Keep all the other NFA restrictions. Form 1, Form 4, fingerprinting, etc. Just like it is now.
-- For machine guns and destructive devices (cannon, bazookas, grenade launchers, bombs, missiles), keep the current NFA rules in place. Same procedure, same fees and taxes.
-- BUT, repeal the Hughes Amendment to the NFA, and allow post-1986 machineguns to be sold to the public again. We allowed vetted and screened gun-collecting citizens to own newly-made machineguns from 1934-1986 without any problems. There was no "NFA registered guns being used in serious crime" problem that would even potentially justify the 1986 machinegun ban. And in the 30 years since the ban has been in place, no benefit has been derived. If there are fewer incidents of machine guns being used in crimes in these last 30 years (1986-2016) than the prior 30 years (1936-1986), we're not talking about legally-registered machineguns possessed by their correct owners, AND we have to consider that society has changed a lot from the tumultuous 1960s and radical early 1970s. The baby boomers have settled down and stopped causing trouble, for one thing!
-- With the 1986 MG ban repealed, I'll bet 100,000 more machineguns would be made and transferred within a three year period following the law's passage. At $200 per tax each, that's TWENTY MILLION extra dollars of revenue just for full-autos. Just from individual citizens and small businesses. Plus, manufacturers would pop up left and right, paying thousands of dollars per year to the feds to have their Class III S.O.T. to be in that business.
All the ATF workers that used to say busy processing Form 1's and Form 4's and other transfer forms for SBR's, SBS's, AOW's, and SILENCERS can now be re-tasked to working on those forms for machine guns and destructive devices.