Washington
With Marino’s withdrawal — announced by the president in a morning tweet — the administration’s scrutiny of the law intensified. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said he was “very concerned about it” and planned to review whether the DEA needs “more tools” to carry out its mission.
But it was unclear how aggressively Congress will reassess a bill that was passed last year with no opposition. A spokesman for Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said the panel was exploring “the idea of holding an oversight hearing” to learn what had changed since President Barack Obama signed the bill.
Democratic lawmakers, meanwhile, sought to increase pressure for action and cheered Marino’s exit. They argued that his nomination demonstrated a lack of commitment from Trump to addressing the opioid crisis that has gripped the nation.
A Washington Post/60 Minutes investigation published on Sunday explained how a targeted lobbying effort helped bolster legislation, known as the Ensuring Patient Access and Effective Drug Enforcement Act, that made it harder for the DEA to act against giant drug distributors, some of which were fined for repeatedly ignoring warnings from the agency to shut down suspicious sales of hundreds of millions of pills.
The law makes it virtually impossible for the DEA to freeze such questionable shipments from the companies, according to internal agency and Justice Department documents and an independent assessment by the agency’s chief administrative law judge in a soon-to-be-published law review article. That powerful tool had allowed the DEA to immediately prevent narcotic painkillers from spilling into the black market.
Rep. Judy Chu, D-Calif., an original co-sponsor of the bill, called on Tuesday for an investigation into whether the law is harming enforcement and for hearings to examine whether she was misled about its impact.
Chu, one of only a few Democrats to put her name on the bill, said then-acting DEA administrator Chuck Rosenberg — who has declined repeated interview requests — told her in a meeting last year after the measure became law that it “did not interfere with the DEA’s ability to successfully stop bad actors.”
A letter sent by Chu on Tuesday to two House committee chairmen is the first account of Rosenberg’s position on the law.