This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, August 29th, 2017.

I'm Caleb Brown.

President Obama suspended the program that equips local police with surplus military equipment

that included mine-resistant armored personnel carriers and 50-caliber

weaponry.

Now the Trump White House is restoring the program.

Cato's Clark Neely and Adam Bates comment.

We've got to go back to the beginning.

In 1997, President Clinton signed into law a program that included what's now called the 1033 program that makes

available at no cost surplus military equipment to local law enforcement agencies that requested.

There was that that sort of opened the floodgates and since then about $6 billion worth of equipment

have gone to local law enforcement agencies. More than 80% of counties have received at least something

through the program.

And President Obama made some modest restrictions to the program but didn't end it.

So the reforms that the President Obama issued,

they basically banned the transfer of only a handful of I guess exotic weapons and equipment so grenade

launchers 50 caliber rifles tracked vehicles military uniforms, and bayonets, funnily enough.

And despite my thought that I couldn't imagine why the federal government was giving local police bayonets and I was curious

if that was just something that was thrown in, apparently the Obama administration actually

did recover about 1600 bayonets from local police.

Out of 12,000 issued so it kind of makes you wonder what's going on with the remaining ones,

but nevertheless, that's unfortunately, this contrast with the way local police agencies try to describe what's going on with this

...