An AP investigation confirmed that DEA agents under the Biden administration deliberately let at least 1.8 million fentanyl pills flood Albuquerque streets between 2023 and 2025, and then sidelined the agent who dared say so out loud.
The Associated Press published its investigation on June 22, drawing on records and interviews with three current and former DEA agents to document what one of them called, plainly, a decision that got Americans killed. The DEA watched drug shipments land in New Mexico, logged what it saw, and did nothing to stop the pills from reaching buyers. The rationale: federal prosecutors wanted bigger cases. The cost: communities flooded with fentanyl while agents stood down.
DEA Special Agent David Howell, who worked the Albuquerque field, put it without euphemism. "We poisoned our community to make cases," he told the AP. "Through our own willful blindness, we get to say, 'We don't really know what happened to the drugs.' But we 100% got people killed." Howell filed a formal whistleblower complaint in late 2023 after watching agents monitor a June 2023 transaction at an Albuquerque mobile home park in which traffickers delivered 74,000 fentanyl pills without a single arrest. That figure, confirmed later in federal court filings, was one data point in a pattern Howell's disclosures put at no fewer than 1.8 million pills let through on a single investigation. A former DEA supervisor told the AP the number climbed into the millions across a separate multi-state probe.
The approach has a name in law enforcement circles: controlled delivery. The idea is to let contraband move, map the network, and roll up the entire operation at once rather than seizing one shipment and tipping off those above. Done narrowly and with tight oversight, it is a legitimate investigative tool. What Howell alleged was something different: a systematic, prolonged decision by the Biden Justice Department and DEA leadership to let hundreds of thousands of pills circulate in American neighborhoods for years in pursuit of a prosecution trophy. The parallel to Operation Fast and Furious, the Obama-era ATF program that walked guns to Mexican cartels with catastrophic results, was not lost on critics. That program cost Agent Brian Terry his life and produced a years-long congressional battle. This one, if the whistleblower records hold up, ran longer and touched more pills.
The operation eventually produced results, of a kind. In May 2025, then-Attorney General Pam Bondi announced what the Justice Department called the largest fentanyl bust in DEA history, a seizure of more than 3 million pills connected to the same network. The bust came after the Trump administration took office. Whether the investigative gains justified the exposure of New Mexico communities to years of unseized fentanyl is precisely the question Howell raised, and the question his superiors apparently did not want asked.
The Retaliation
After Howell submitted his complaint to the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, he was pulled from fieldwork and reassigned to desk duty. He was also barred from testifying in court cases connected to his investigations. The Office of Special Counsel, which exists specifically to protect federal employees from this kind of pressure, found a "substantial likelihood of wrongdoing" in Howell's disclosures and referred the matter to the Justice Department for investigation. What the Biden DOJ did with that referral, if anything, is not publicly established. Empower Oversight, a watchdog group focused on whistleblower protection, has since asked both the Senate Judiciary Committee and the DOJ's Office of Inspector General to take up Howell's claims.
The DEA issued a denial, saying that descriptions suggesting the agency "knowingly permitted fentanyl to reach communities are false and fundamentally mischaracterize the facts." The agency did not address the specific transaction at the Albuquerque mobile home park confirmed in court filings, or the scope of the pill figures Howell documented.
What makes this story harder to dismiss than the DEA's statement is the sourcing. The AP used named agents, on-the-record disclosures, and federal court filings. Howell did not leak anonymously; he filed a formal complaint through official channels, accepted the professional consequences, and then went on record. The Office of Special Counsel, not a conservative outlet, found his allegations credible enough to escalate. The Biden administration, which spent years casting itself as the responsible, evidence-based alternative on drug policy while hammering the Trump administration on fentanyl, was presiding over an operation in which its own agents believed they were killing the people they were supposed to protect.
The Senate Judiciary Committee has the referral from Empower Oversight in hand. The DOJ Inspector General's office has been asked to investigate. Whether either body moves before the story fades from the news cycle is now the question. Howell is still at a desk. The 1.8 million pills are not coming back.
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