In June 2023, federal agents sat outside a mobile home park in Albuquerque and counted. They had cracked the coded phone chatter and watched the deal come together. They tallied the shipment down to the pill: 74,000 fentanyl tablets, a number prosecutors would later confirm in a court filing. The agents seized none of it. Days earlier the same ring had moved a spare tire packed with more, and that went untouched too.

They did not miss the drugs. They counted them and let them go.

That is the center of an investigation the Associated Press published this week, built on government records and three current and former Drug Enforcement Administration agents. Between 2023 and 2025, the DEA let hundreds of thousands of fentanyl pills reach the streets of New Mexico. In one multistate case, a veteran agent reported that his colleagues allowed at least 1.8 million pills to be delivered before the bust finally came.

This was no rogue act by one field office. In 2024, Biden's Justice Department rewrote its own rules to permit exactly this. The agent who objected was pushed onto desk duty. The department's watchdog reviewed the conduct and blessed it. A drug the government now calls a weapon of mass destruction was left on the street as bait.

They knew it to the pill

The agents were not guessing. One 66-page report tallied the 74,000-pill delivery to the digit. Special Agent David Howell, who watched it happen, put it flatly to the AP: “We did nothing but sit back and watch.”

Albuquerque has a neighborhood so overrun it is known as “War Zone.” Overdose deaths fell about 14 percent across the country last year. In New Mexico they rose 21 percent, one of the few states moving the wrong way. Howell started flagging deaths that might trace back to the pills his agency let pass. One was a 15-month-old who died in Española after ingesting burned fentanyl residue.

Howell went further with the AP: “We poisoned our community to make cases. ... But we 100% got people killed.”

In 2017 the rule said seize it. In 2024 they made it optional.

There was a rule, and it was not ambiguous. The Justice Department adopted a two-page set of “Fentanyl Protocols” in 2017 that told agents to “seize or otherwise prevent the distribution” of fentanyl “as soon as practicable.” Public safety, the document said, “is paramount,” whether or not a seizure cost the agency a bigger case.

Letting drugs run to trace them up the chain is an old tactic, older than this administration. The 2017 rule was written for exactly that temptation. It still told agents to take the poison off the street.

That is the rule Biden's Justice Department rewrote. In 2024 it loosened the protocols to give agents discretion. They “may exercise discretion in determining whether to take action to prevent the trafficking of fentanyl,” now weighing public safety against “the benefits to be achieved through preserving the investigation.”

The 2017 rule made public safety the controlling command. The 2024 version made it one factor to be balanced against a prosecutor's ambition. The pills that flooded New Mexico flooded it under the looser rule, in the years the looser rule was written.

Nobody slipped this past the government

This was not a border-security failure. The fentanyl in New Mexico was not slipping through a gap in the fence. Most fentanyl crosses through legal ports of entry, hidden in cars and cargo, and the Sentencing Commission's own numbers show the large majority of people convicted of trafficking it are American citizens. The smugglers are not beating the government at the border.

In Albuquerque, the government was not even trying to beat it. Agents had the deliveries under live surveillance and knew the pill counts. They chose to watch. You cannot blame a porous border for a shipment your own agents are watching.

Everyone closed ranks but Howell

Howell did what whistleblowers are told to do. He filed a complaint in late 2023 with the Office of Special Counsel, which first found a “substantial likelihood of wrongdoing” and asked the Justice Department to look into it. The Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility, Biden's department reviewing Biden's department, found the decisions reasonable and concluded there was no “specific danger to public health.” The Special Counsel then deemed that report reasonable and closed the loop.

None of this happened inside a healthy agency. Biden's DEA administrator spent her tenure under a Justice Department inspector general's review over millions in no-bid contracts steered to her own associates. The agency's deputy operations chief had already told NPR in 2021 that Mexican counterparts were “too afraid to even engage” with American agents and that the cartels feared no one.

So the man who tried to seize the fentanyl became the problem. The DEA put Howell on desk duty for more than a year and docked his evaluations. Prosecutors barred him from testifying in federal court. They cited his “pattern of refusing to heed” orders to let drugs go unseized.

The cleanup was not just internal. In January, NPR ran a piece headlined “How Biden made big gains battling street fentanyl but lost the messaging war to Trump.” The story credited his administration with historic progress and faulted only its failure to brag about it.

The national decline was real, driven mostly by weaker street supply after China curbed the chemicals used to make it. Grant the win. But the same Justice Department being praised for quietly beating fentanyl was, in those same months, rewriting the rule that let documented fentanyl reach the street, in a state where the deaths went up. Six months after NPR's story, the AP told the New Mexico half as an “agency” failure. The New Mexico U.S. Attorney's office confirmed the timeline anyway. It told the AP the conduct “happened during the prior administration.”

One pill can kill. They watched anyway.

The defense, when officials offer one, is that the strategy works. Alex Uballez, Biden's U.S. Attorney in New Mexico, told the AP “the bigger fish are worth catching, and that will save more lives.” That claim has to answer for 74,000 pills in a single deal and a 21 percent rise in dead New Mexicans, one of them a toddler in Española.

The 1.8-million-pill case ended in the largest fentanyl bust in DEA history, more than three million pills, announced in May 2025 by then-Attorney General Pam Bondi. A supervisor on the case told the AP the haul “was hitting the streets every month while that case was going on,” and that the ring could have been dismantled six months sooner. The trophy was inflated by the pills the agents let pass. The DEA disputes all of it. It calls the decisions “lawful, reasonable under the circumstances and consistent with Department guidance.”

The DEA also runs a campaign called “One Pill Can Kill.” It ran that campaign while its agents counted the pills and watched them go.

Banned after Fast and Furious. Revived in 2024.

The agents who watched the fentanyl had a precedent in mind, and they named it: Operation Fast and Furious. Under President Obama, federal agents let about 2,000 guns reach Mexican cartel buyers to trace them to bigger targets, then lost most of them. Two turned up where Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was killed in 2010. The round that killed him was too damaged to match to either rifle, but the guns were there. The scandal cost Attorney General Eric Holder a contempt-of-Congress vote, the first against a sitting Attorney General in American history, after President Obama claimed executive privilege over the records.

Afterward, the Justice Department forbade its agents from letting guns be trafficked to build a case. The 2024 fentanyl rewrite did the opposite. More than a decade after Fast and Furious, the same department that had banned the tactic for guns told its agents they could use it for a deadlier poison.

He flagged it. They benched him.

David Howell joined the DEA after a decade in the Navy. He flagged the unseized shipments and named the dead. He asked his own government to stop. For that he was moved to a desk, marked down, and silenced in court, while the prosecutors who let the pills run kept building their case. Empower Oversight, the group now carrying his complaint to the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Justice Department's inspector general, put the standard plainly: “It is outrageous to put that many lives at risk in hopes of making a big case.”

The agents knew the number. They knew it was 74,000 in one deal and more than a million across the case. Knowing was never the problem. Acting on it was the one thing the rules, after 2024, no longer required.