Ranking Member Cartwright Statement at the Fiscal Year 2024 Budget Request for the Drug Enforcement Administration Hearing

Congressman Matt Cartwright (D-PA), Ranking Member of the Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Subcommittee, delivered the following remarks at the Subcommittee's hearing on the Fiscal Year 2024 Request Request for the Drug Enforcement Administration Components:

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Allow me to take this opportunity to thank you, Mr. Chairman, for forming Operation Unite in your district and for what this has grown into. I also attended, along with three other members of this Subcommittee, the prescription and illicit drugs summit at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta. Administrator Milgram, thank you for attending that as well. It’s efforts like that where we all work together, and all different disciplines get together and listen to each other, that are going to be part of the solution.   

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I join you in welcoming Administrator Milgram in her first appearance before the subcommittee, good luck to you, to discuss the DEA’s fiscal year 2024 budget request.

Fifty years ago, the DEA was established to address the growing drug problem in the United States and to consolidate the enforcement of a newly enacted Controlled Substances Act.  Then-President Nixon had declared “an all-out global war on the drug menace” and charged DEA to be the lead Federal law enforcement agency at the frontline in this war. 

In 1973, DEA was a little more than a fifth of its current workforce with a budget of $75 million and staffed with 1,470 special agents deployed domestically and internationally, a quarter of its current special agent workforce today. Certainly, the drug enforcement challenges of the 1970s remain true today, it is safe to say the evolution of this fifty-year war from “plant-based” narcotics such as cocaine, heroin and marijuana to those made in laboratories, synthetic drugs, that require no “growing season” has amassed an increasing number of casualties. And the Chairman is right. 107,000 Americans a year are perishing from this. And we can’t work hard enough to counter it.

In 2017, the Department of Health and Human Services declared the opioid crisis “a public health emergency.” Synthetic opioids, precursor chemicals, and pill presses were flooding into the U.S. through international mail. In response, Congress enacted the STOP Act in 2018 to help curb the flow of these drugs into the country.  The rapid evolution of e-commerce, especially during the pandemic, further exacerbated the problem of opioid misuse. 

Mexican cartels—these are evil people who do not care how many Americans died even on their first injection of fentanyl—Mexican cartels opted to leverage their existing business model to import precursor chemicals from China to produce synthetic opioids, such as fentanyl, to meet a growing demand that they are helping create – a demand that has resulted, as I said, in over 100,000 U.S. deaths in just the last year. The accessibility and affordability of these drugs leaves DEA and its Federal, State, and local partners in a continuous state of defensive posture to keep dangerous narcotics out of our communities and successfully to combat the drug trafficking networks who are responsible.

At the same time, I have to express my very strong opposition to the House majority’s plan, as included in legislation that passed the House last night, barely and on partisan lines, to implement drastic cuts in discretionary spending. This will enormously damage the work of non-defense agencies like the DEA. And I believe that Congress has to instead continue to build on the investments we have made to provide the DEA with the resources you need to address its existing and emerging challenges in the war on drugs. Responsible resources provided by this Subcommittee over the past few years helped aid DEA’s efforts, including its work that led to the indictment of several leaders of the Sinaloa Cartel two weeks ago. Our continued investment in the DEA sends a clear signal to our adversaries on the global stage that we will not allow this attack on our people, on our communities to continue without consequence, and that those responsible will be held accountable by our justice system.

Administrator Milgram, I want to applaud the work of the men and women of the DEA, and I look forward to working with you on how we can best invest in the agency in fiscal year 2024 to continue this all-important war on drugs in America.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, I yield back.