DEA Promises Improvements, Should Any Improvements Happen To Be Located

An active DEA agent says the agency allowed millions of fentanyl pills onto the streets while trying to build bigger cases. In his first television interview, David Howell told CBS News that he had warned his managers for three years.

The Justice Department says an independent inspector-general investigation is ongoing. Howell’s allegations have not been resolved by that investigation, and they should not be treated as a completed verdict.

The DEA, meanwhile, supplied this: “If improvements are identified, DEA will implement them.”

Well. Excellent. We have achieved a sentence.

A magnificent little government sentence, polished until no sharp edge of responsibility remains. It could refer to a drug-enforcement operation, a cafeteria suggestion box or a printer that has been making the same grinding noise since the Bush administration.

If improvements are identified.

Where are we looking? Have they wandered off? Did somebody last see an improvement near the elevators, wearing a visitor’s badge and asking which floor contains the people who make decisions?

Howell’s allegation concerns a tactic known as letting drugs “walk”: allowing traffickers to continue distributing them while investigators follow the trail. He says fentanyl was supposed to be treated differently because of its lethality.

Investigations involve difficult decisions. There is a reason we employ trained professionals rather than handing every case to whichever man at the barbecue has watched the most police television.

But if Howell’s account is right, somebody needs to explain exactly how the calculations worked. Who approved the risk? What were the limits? Who checked whether the operation was making the community safer while the larger case was still somewhere over the horizon?

Those questions deserve answers longer than a sentence that sounds as though it was assembled from the spare parts of a hotel’s response to a broken ice machine.

Howell described a 2023 seizure of thousands of fentanyl pills. He alleges prosecutors chastised the agents afterward for interfering with the broader operation.

Again: his allegation. An investigation must establish what happened.

But, but—if stopping a dangerous shipment earns a reprimand, I would like to see the fucking performance rubric. Does the employee get marked down under insufficient patience with the drugs? Is there a box for prematurely accomplished the agency’s stated purpose?

I am going to put the rubric down before my blood pressure starts requiring its own oversight committee.

The DOJ says the DEA administrator requested the independent investigation when the whistleblower came forward. Good. That is a concrete step. The investigation needs room to do its work, and the agency should not manufacture answers to satisfy a news cycle.

The public also deserves to know what protections apply in the meantime. An unresolved investigation is a reason to be precise. It is a lousy substitute for explaining how people are being protected today.

The statement promises to implement improvements if they are found. Somewhere inside that phrasing, the entire burden of action has been placed on the improvement to identify itself.

For an agency whose job involves finding things people are trying to hide, that is an unusually passive search strategy.