The Justice Department's own watchdog released an audit on Wednesday that checked how the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the U.S. Marshals Service handle their secret informants. The verdict was largely reassuring: the four agencies mostly follow the rules. But the rulebook itself is old — the guidance covering three of the four agencies was last updated in 2002 — and it has not caught up with the administration's decisions to treat drug cartels as terrorist organisations and fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction.
A confidential informant is a person who feeds information to federal agents on a continuing basis. Informants are often inside, or close to, the criminal organisations the agencies are investigating, and they are frequently paid for what they provide. The FBI calls its informants "confidential human sources"; the audit, carried out by the department's Office of the Inspector General, uses "confidential informant" for all of them. Auditors reviewed the agencies' policy documents, training and forms against the Attorney General's guidelines — they examined the rulebooks, not individual informant files, and the report publishes no count of how many informants the agencies run or what they are paid.
The sharpest gap is about where the drug war now sits. Executive orders designating cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, and fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction, have shifted drug trafficking out of ordinary law enforcement and into national security. The informant guidelines covering the ATF, the DEA and the Marshals Service do not apply to intelligence or counterintelligence work — which means that on exactly the cartel matters the administration has made its priority, those three agencies have no informant rulebook governing the work at all. The same old guidance also barely contemplates how informants are now paid: cash is giving way to electronic payments, FBI personnel told auditors cryptocurrency could be an effective way to pay informants, and the department has set no controls for the bank and virtual transactions involved.
The second problem is that the department works from two rulebooks that do not match. The FBI must report to the department every year on all the criminal activity its informants were authorised to commit; the ATF, DEA and Marshals Service have no such reporting duty, so the department's picture of that activity is incomplete. The FBI can also run a "high-level" informant — someone closely tied to a criminal enterprise — for up to 60 days before a review committee fully approves the arrangement, while the other three agencies must get that approval first. Same kind of informant, different levels of oversight, depending on the badge.
The third finding concerns the most sensitive part of the system. Informants are sometimes authorised in advance to break the law — buying drugs, moving firearms, staying inside a gang — because that is what keeps them credible. The audit calls this "otherwise illegal activity," and it found that monitoring of it needs to improve. The ATF, DEA and Marshals Service do not have complete policies for the risks when an informant operation involves dangerous goods such as firearms, and the ATF and Marshals Service do not require, in every case, that informants be given written instructions before they carry out otherwise illegal acts. The watchdog's warning is blunt: handled loosely, the government can end up furthering the very criminal enterprises it is paying to penetrate, and people or property can be harmed.
One payment practice drew a specific warning. The Marshals Service pays its informants by sending the money into deputy marshals' own bank accounts, to be withdrawn and handed over. Auditors said that method raises security risks and does not adequately protect against fraud. The Marshals Service told them it is working on a new way to pay.
The audit makes five recommendations — one to the Deputy Attorney General's office, to update the department-wide guidance, and one to each of the four agencies, to fix the gaps in their own policies. The department and all four agencies agreed with every one. The Deputy Attorney General's office said it will convene a working group of the agencies to rewrite the guidance, to be called together within 120 days; the FBI expects its updated policy language in early 2027; the DEA says it has already begun editing its policy; and the Marshals Service is finalising a new informant payment system with a global wire transfer company and plans stronger training.
For ordinary Americans, this is the machinery behind the cartel and fentanyl cases that land in their own communities: informants are how federal agents get inside those organisations. The guardrails are what keep that tool from backfiring — the auditors list the risks of outdated guidance as criminal activity being furthered, threats to public safety, abuse of the informant programme and waste of taxpayer funds. Wednesday's audit says the agencies are, in the main, playing by the rules they have been given. Its argument is that the rules themselves now need to catch up with the fight the administration says it is waging.
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