Say Goodbye to the Nation’s Largest and Most Effective Anti-Crime Task Force

On October 31, the last employees of one of the nation’s largest and most effective organizations created to combat drug cartels will leave the Justice Department.

They were terminated through a Reduction in Force, as part of the department’s decision to dissolve the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces, or OCDETF - leaving our country less capable of building and coordinating large-scale federal law enforcement operations that target drug trafficking networks.

On July 23, 2025, the Deputy Attorney General ordered OCDETF to transfer all of its 5,000-plus cases – to an organization that did not yet exist.

What is OCDETF?

Most Americans are probably unfamiliar with OCDETF (pronounced “Oh-Seh-Def”) by name; however, they have very likely heard about OCDETF’s work on national and local news.

OCDETF was the largest anti-crime task force in the country. Since 1982, the OCDETF program has served as the centerpiece of the Attorney General’s strategy to reduce the supply of illicit and dangerous drugs and to dismantle organized crime and drug trafficking networks. Newsworthy law enforcement efforts against organized crime networks and high-level drug cartel leaders, like the prosecution of Sinaloa Cartel leader Chapo Guzman, resulted from OCDETF cases.

Before the order to terminate the program, OCDETF had national reach with thousands of prosecutor-led, case-specific task forces spread across every one of the country’s 93 judicial districts. Nineteen OCDETF Strike Forces - regional partnerships based in key cities - conducted missions that included targeting drug cartel leadership, violent gangs, human smuggling, human trafficking, and maritime drug smuggling.

The termination of DOJ’s OCDETF program comes as the Trump Administration ceases the United States’ lawful maritime drug interdiction mission in favor of its questionable use of military strikes against alleged drug smuggling vessels. Several former OCDETF strike forces, including its Panama Express Strike Force, were centrally involved in conducting enterprise investigations of maritime smuggling networks and prosecuting the defendants arrested during the evidence-based interdictions.

The OCDETF program also included the OCDETF Fusion Center, whose intelligence holdings constituted the single largest repository of federal and foreign investigative reporting – including financial data – in the United States. The OCDETF Fusion Center brought casework and intelligence from across a wide range of agencies – a unique tool that helped task forces in the field identify criminal networks and effectively coordinate how to dismantle them.

Why OCDETF?

Forty-three years ago, the Reagan Administration understood that federal prosecutors under the authority of the Attorney General needed to be empowered to better coordinate the efforts of multiple federal agencies combatting the South American cocaine organizations that were the most significant organized crime threat of that time. Reagan created OCDETF to overcome interagency stovepipes, where intelligence remains within one organization and is not shared with others. Dozens of federal law enforcement agencies enforce federal criminal statutes, not just from the Justice Department but also from Homeland Security, Treasury, Labor, State, as well as the Postal Service. These agencies had little incentive to share what they knew, and gaps between their differing authorities, and the purpose for which each agency is funded by Congress, made it challenging to conduct joint investigations of criminal networks.

These investigative challenges still exist today.

Federal prosecutors, however, may investigate and prosecute all federal criminal offenses. They have the authority to view information and evidence collected by any federal law enforcement agency to determine whether a crime has been committed and whether prosecution is supported. Law enforcement agencies regularly share information with prosecutors that they do not necessarily share with each other. Federal prosecutors also play an important role in synchronizing the investigative efforts of multiple agencies into effective prosecutions. U.S. Attorneys, and not the special agents in charge of field offices, are the senior federal law enforcement officers in their districts.

OCDETF’s central staffing and set-apart Congressional funding stream broke the investigative stovepipes and ensured that investigators and prosecutors worked together under the authority and direction of the Attorney General.

If agencies wished to access the additional resources that OCDETF provided, then they had to work together with prosecutors to build effective enterprise investigations. Prosecutors led intelligence-driven, targeted investigations and directed the funding to wherever it was needed to perform that mission - whether it was inside or outside the Justice Department.

That model worked.

At the close of FY2025 in September, we issued the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces Final Report, marking the end of OCDETF’s 43-year lifespan.

Since 1982, OCDETF task forces conducted more than 37,200 investigations of criminal enterprises and dismantled or significantly disrupted over 21,100 of them. These investigations led to the conviction of over 321,000 defendants, the seizure of $13.4 billion in cash and property, and the seizure of over 870,000 weapons.

The majority of these investigations targeted high-level members of violent drug trafficking organizations and cartels.

What replaced OCDETF?

So where did all those 5,000-plus cases go when OCDETF was shut down in July?

They went to Homeland Security Task Forces created under an executive order issued on President Trump’s first day in office, which only became fully operational in September.

The Administration asserts that OCDETF’s work will be continued by these task forces; however, that is not entirely accurate.

The Homeland Security Task Force mission places more emphasis on immigration offenses and human smuggling than on joint law enforcement efforts to combat organized crime and drug trafficking. The HSTF model eliminates the role of prosecutors in creating and coordinating task forces, and criminal enterprise investigations that include financial investigations are no longer a priority. Additionally, there is a funding shortage to cover the continuing operation of the OCDETF Fusion Center, as well as questions concerning the oversight and governance over the sensitive law enforcement information in its database.

President Trump and several members of his Cabinet held a White House event last Thursday during which they touted the success of the HSTF and shamefully criticized the Biden Administration’s efforts to address the drug cartels and organized crime. Their comments were misleading, self-serving, and unfair. The Deputy Attorney General gifted more than 5,000 cases to the HSTF that were initiated and developed by OCDETF task forces during the Biden Administration. The prosecutors, agents, analysts, paralegals, and other staff in those OCDETF task forces worked together, across agency and department lines, doing the difficult work to attack organized crime groups, and the statistics quoted during that White House event should be attributed appropriately. The Trump Administration did not invent interagency cooperation, it has been working for decades.

Members of Congress have expressed concerns over the closure of OCDETF, which has enjoyed bipartisan support over its 43-year history. The program has proved to be a successful model for joint law enforcement efforts to combat drug trafficking and organized crime, and both chambers of Congress have included funding for the OCDETF Program in their proposed FY2026 budgets.

The termination of OCDETF undermines the role of federal prosecutors as coordinators of criminal enterprise investigations and weakens law enforcement by eviscerating DOJ’s ability to dismantle sophisticated transnational criminal networks.

If the Trump Administration were truly serious about prioritizing the attack on drug cartels and transnational criminal organizations, it would further empower and resource the OCDETF program or build upon its successful structure, rather than shut it down in favor of an unproven structure with a more limited mission.

America is left more vulnerable to organized crime threats as this Administration continues to weaken the Justice Department and defund effective law enforcement programs like OCDETF.

Thomas Padden is a retired Senior Executive and career federal prosecutor with over 31 years experience combating drug trafficking organizations. After conducting OCDETF investigations and prosecutions of Mexican and South American drug trafficking organizations as a line prosecutor, he served in Senior Executive leadership positions in the Criminal Division’s Narcotic and Dangerous Drug Section (NDDS) and DOJ’s National Drug Intelligence Center (NDIC) before serving the last 17 years of his career as the Deputy Director and Acting Director of OCDETF.