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The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988 granted the Director of the Ofice of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) the authority to designate any area in the United States a High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA). The rationale was to create a * mechanism for directing additional assistance to the most important drug trafficking areas in the United States. In 1990, the Director designated the five HIDTAs that are reviewed in this report: New York/New Jersey, Los Angeles, South Florida, Houston, and the Southwest Border. There are now 28 HIDTA regions, covering part or all of 40 states, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The geographic scope of the program has expanded so dramatically that in an interview, one ONDCP official quipped, “We used to keep track of the HIDTA program by listing areas that had HIDTAs; now, we just list areas that don’t have HIDTAs.” The HIDTA program can no longer be seen as directing hnds to specific regions; it is de facto a national program. And the purpose of the program has indeed changed. The mission is now to enhance America’s drug-control efforts by improving coordination among local, state, and Federal law enforcement agencies. The KIDTA program finds a variety of anti-drug initiatives in each HIDTA region. The bulk of these initiatives, both in terms of assigned enforcement personnel and fbnding, involve multi-agency law enforcement task forces designed to investigate drug trafficking organizations, interdict drugs, or attack a particular aspect of drug trafficking, such as money laundering. While many task forces are effective, they are too often assembled indiscriminately. Some task forces in the five sites reviewed were put together to address circumstances where an absence of coordination among enforcement