21 U.S.C. § 1706 — High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas Program

(a) Establishment. The Office of National Drug Control Policy runs a program called the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas (HIDTA) Program. Its purpose is to reduce drug trafficking and drug production in the United States, by getting federal, state, local, and tribal law enforcement to cooperate, share information, and coordinate enforcement; by improving intelligence-sharing among them; by giving them reliable intelligence to design effective strategies and operations; and by supporting coordinated strategies that make the best use of available resources to cut the drug supply, both in designated areas and nationwide. (b) Designation. The Director, working with the Attorney General, the Secretary of the Treasury, the Secretary of Homeland Security, the heads of other national drug-control agencies, and the relevant governor, may designate any specific area of the United States as a high intensity drug trafficking area. After designating an area, to provide it federal help, the Director may spend Program money there, temporarily reassign federal staff there with their home agency's approval, take other authorized actions to boost federal assistance, and coordinate administrative, recordkeeping, and funding activities with state, local, and tribal officials. (c) Petitions for designation. The Director must set up regulations letting a coalition of interested local law enforcement agencies petition to be designated. Those regulations must include regular review of petitions by the Director, along with a recommendation from a panel of independent experts. (d) Factors for consideration. In deciding whether to designate an area, the Director considers — along with any other criteria found appropriate — whether the area is a significant center of illegal drug production, manufacturing, importing, or distribution; whether state, local, and tribal agencies have already committed resources there, showing they're serious about tackling the problem; whether drug-related activity is doing serious harm in that area or elsewhere; and whether a significant boost in federal resources is genuinely necessary. (e) Organization. To get funding, each high intensity drug trafficking area must have an Executive Board, which names a chairman, vice chairman, and any other officers it needs. The Board is responsible for directing and overseeing the area's goals, managing its funds, reviewing and approving funding proposals, and reviewing and approving reports sent to the Director. No funds may be spent on an area, region, or partnership unless its Executive Board splits voting power equally between federal representatives and state, local, and tribal representatives; if it's impractical to have equal numbers physically at a meeting, the Board may use proxy or weighted votes to keep that balance. These eligibility rules exist to ensure federal funds are used responsibly, and are not meant to create a legal agency relationship between individual HIDTAs and the federal government. (f) Use of funds. The Director must make sure no more than 5% of the Program's federal funding, in total, goes to substance use disorder treatment programs and drug prevention programs. (g) Counterterrorism activities. The Director may let HIDTA resources help federal, state, local, and tribal agencies investigate and prevent terrorism, especially — though not only — where it overlaps with drug trafficking. But the Director must ensure that this help stays secondary to the Program's core purpose of reducing drug availability and carrying out drug-related enforcement, and that significant Program resources are not shifted to purely terrorism-related work, except temporarily and only in extraordinary circumstances the Director determines. (h) Role of the Drug Enforcement Administration. The Director, working with the Attorney General, must ensure a DEA representative sits on the Intelligence Support Center for every high intensity drug trafficking area. (i) Annual budget submissions. As part of the President's yearly budget request for the Office, the Director must give Congress a justification that includes: the proposed funding for each area, based on the Office's review of that area's request and performance, with the reasons behind each request; a detailed explanation of the proposed funding levels, based on a current assessment of the drug trafficking threat in each area, how the funding will help each area meet its goals, and how it supports the National Drug Control Strategy; and the amount of HIDTA money used the previous year to investigate and prosecute methamphetamine trafficking, along with a description of how it was used. (j) Emerging threat response fund. Subject to available appropriations, the Director may spend up to 10% of the Program's funds at his own discretion, to respond to an emerging drug trafficking threat in an existing area, or to create a new area or expand an existing one, following the criteria in this subsection. In deciding how to allocate this money, the Director considers its impact on reducing overall drug trafficking or on keeping an emerging threat from spreading to other parts of the country, plus any other criteria the Director considers appropriate. (k) Evaluation. Within 90 days of December 29, 2006, the Director, after consulting each area's Executive Board, must report to Congress describing, for each designated area: its specific purposes; its long-term and short-term goals and objectives; how performance toward those goals will be measured; and what reporting is needed to evaluate that performance. Each year after that, as part of the annual National Drug Control Strategy report, the Director must again describe each area's purposes and goals, and evaluate how well it is meeting them. (l) Assessment of drug enforcement task forces. Within 1 year of December 29, 2006, and every year after that as part of the Strategy report, the Director must report to Congress assessing the number and operations of every federally funded drug enforcement task force in each area, and describing: each federal, state, local, and tribal task force operating there; how those task forces coordinate with each other, with any area-wide task force, and with investigations funded by the Organized Crime and Drug Enforcement Task Force program; what steps each task force takes to share drug trafficking and production information with other federally funded task forces in the area; the area's role in coordinating that information sharing; how much each federal, state, local, and tribal participant actually cooperates in sharing information; how well information-sharing and enforcement is coordinated with joint terrorism task forces; and any recommendations to make task forces use their resources more efficiently. (m) Assessment of law enforcement intelligence sharing. Within 180 days of December 29, 2006, and every year after that as part of the Strategy report, the Director, working with the Director of National Intelligence, must report to Congress evaluating the intelligence systems each area uses or supports — including how well they let federal, state, local, and tribal agencies, both inside and outside the area, access that intelligence; how much participating agencies actually share intelligence to assess drug threats and design strategy; and what's needed to improve information sharing, both within a given area and between that area and similar agencies elsewhere. (n) Coordination with the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force program. The Director, working with the Attorney General, must ensure that drug intelligence gathered by each area's Intelligence Support Center is shared promptly with the Justice Department's drug intelligence fusion center. (o) Use of funds to combat methamphetamine trafficking. As part of the President's annual budget request, the Director must report to Congress on how HIDTA funds were used the previous year to investigate and prosecute methamphetamine trafficking. The report must include: the number of methamphetamine manufacturing sites found through HIDTA-funded work in the previous year; the amounts of methamphetamine or listed chemicals seized through HIDTA-funded work; and DEA intelligence and predictive data on patterns and trends in methamphetamine and listed-chemical abuse, trafficking, and transport. Before awarding money to a HIDTA, the Director must certify that its participating law enforcement agencies are sending laboratory seizure data to the national clandestine laboratory database at the El Paso Intelligence Center. (p) Authorization of appropriations. Congress is authorized to appropriate to the Office: $240,000,000 for fiscal year 2007; $250,000,000 for fiscal year 2008; $260,000,000 for fiscal year 2009; $270,000,000 for fiscal year 2010; $280,000,000 for fiscal year 2011; and $280,000,000 for each of fiscal years 2018 through 2023. (q) Specific purposes. The Director must ensure at least $7,000,000 of each year's Program funding goes to areas with severe neighborhood safety and illegal drug distribution problems. That money must go toward protecting neighborhoods and communities, including preventing intimidation of witnesses to drug distribution and related crimes, and supporting programs that protect or assist witnesses in court proceedings. The Director must work with HIDTAs to develop and maintain best-practice models for witness safety, relocation, and financial and housing assistance, and other witness-protection services, and must ensure those models are shared with every HIDTA. (r) Drug overdose response strategy. The Director may use Program funds to carry out a nationwide drug overdose response strategy in high intensity drug trafficking areas, by coordinating multi-agency efforts to prevent, reduce, and respond to overdoses — including uniform reporting of fatal and non-fatal overdoses to public health and safety officials — increasing data sharing among public health and safety officials on drug abuse trends, including new psychoactive substances, and related crime, and enabling coordinated deployment of prevention, intervention, and enforcement resources to address substance use addiction and drug trafficking. (s) Supplemental grants. The Director may use up to $10,000,000 of the Program's funds for competitive supplemental grants to HIDTAs that have experienced high seizures of fentanyl and new psychoactive substances, to fund portable equipment for testing those substances, training for law enforcement officers and other first responders on best practices for handling them safely, and protective equipment, including overdose reversal drugs.

The record indicates that this section originated in Public Law 105–277, an omnibus appropriations act enacted October 21, 1998, with the relevant text drawn from sections 707 and 715 of Division C, Title VII of that act. The source credit shows the section has since been amended on three further occasions: by Public Law 109–469 in December 2006, which added multiple new provisions across several sections; by Public Law 115–271 in October 2018, which made further amendments across five separate provisions; and by Public Law 116–74 in November 2019, a more limited technical amendment. Taken together, the amendment history reflects sustained congressional attention to this program over roughly two decades. Public Law 105–277 was an end-of-year omnibus appropriations measure, a common vehicle in the late 1990s for attaching substantive policy riders, including drug-control provisions, to must-pass spending legislation. The placement of this section within a title addressing drug-control policy is consistent with that era's broader legislative pattern of expanding federal support for coordinated drug enforcement efforts among different levels of government. Beyond this general observation about the legislative vehicle, the record does not establish the specific committee deliberations, sponsors, or debate that led Congress to include this particular program within the 1998 act. The subsequent amendments in 2006, 2018, and 2019 suggest ongoing legislative refinement of the program's scope and reporting requirements, but the specific motivations behind each amendment are not established by the source credit alone, and no further detail should be inferred beyond what the citation itself documents.