Because a substantial portion of the work of many agencies involves specialized law enforcement in the domain of responsibility, and it's organizationally inefficient for that to invo love coordinating units where the lowest common level of management is the President of the United States.
The spotty history of the FBI notwithstanding, it makes more sense to have smaller decentralized law enforcement units specialized in their given area than to have one large agency made up of the same specialized groups.
So, instead of specialized law enforcement for agencies like the park service and forest service, you want to have generic federal cops accompanying unarmed park/forest specialists, and so on throughout the government? That sounds like it would be somewhere between merely grossly inefficient and utterly disastrous in practice in many cases.
> I realize police work involves more than kicking in doors and shooting bad guys, but surely most of these organizations do not need folks running around with guns.
Maybe some of them don't, and I'd like to hear specific arguments for specific agencies as to how things would be better if they didn't.
But in my working career I've seen enough of people distant from a particular organizations work deciding "surely they don't need <resource> in that organization" and producing bad results thereby that I'm highly.skeptical of such claims without some kind of specific, convincing analysis of why the alternative actually is superior for the specific case.
In any case, the current hyper-local US system for both police and other services is disastrous in practice for many groups of people, and has its own gross inefficiencies (economies of scale are smaller, weaker bargaining positions when purchasing things, etc.).
I've had a neighbor call the cops (in this case sheriff's office) because our horses got out at night. I much prefer dealing with the local deputy who might have a few head of beef cattle himself (and so understand the issues with keeping large animals where you want them to be) vs. a cop from the nearest city who's never had to personally deal with anything other than his cat running around the backyard.
Think of it as community policing on a larger scale.
To the degree that that's true, the basic non-domain specialized training is already shared. [0] There are also, I believe, jointly-developed shard equipment standards and mutiagency equipment purchasing. Even if there weren't, you don't need to put operational authority in a central LE agency to achieve that.
What is the specific benefit to be gained by centralization?
> In any case, the current hyper-local US system for both police and other services is disastrous in practice for many groups of people
A specific argument on this point, particularly about how this is relevant to the subject-matter division of federal agencies rather than the territorial divides of city/county/state general-purpose option policing agencies would be welcome.
A normal state or local cop would have likely just said "hi, good morning, where's your fishing license?" A completely different, though not unpleasant, interaction that would have left me with a different "feeling" about how it happened.
And yes, he was armed. Sidearm in a holster and likely at least one shotgun in the car.
It might be a small factor, but not really. Legal gun owners aren't typically the ones using them against law enforcement anyway (it's not much different than Europe).
Remember that you (as US wildlife enforcement) are a long way away from civilization and medical aid. As such, the chance that you'll potentially be dealing with animals with sharp teeth, claws, and fangs is substantially higher than the average person going fishing on Saturday once every few months. This is the reason geological survey crews (like the USGS) tend to be armed as well.
Contrast this to Western Europe, where any animal of sufficient size to harm a human is endangered if not already extinct. The density of civilization is much greater than it is in the US; if you are injured by something a gun can defend against it's much more likely you'll be quickly rescued. The requirement you be armed out there is much less.
This may be efficient, but we should consider whether inefficiency may actually be a feature. Each individual enforcement arm is weaker, less easily coordinated with others, and less likely to be commandeered in pursuit of overarching federal goals. A common federal law enforcement entity could come to disconcertingly resemble a domestically deployed military.