The Drug Enforcement Administration has quietly ended its body camera program barely four years after it began, according to an internal email (article available here).
On April 2, 2025, DEA headquarters emailed employees announcing that the program had been terminated effective the day before. The DEA has not publicly announced the policy change, but by early April, links to pages about body camera policies on the DEA’s website were broken.
The email said the agency made the change to be “consistent” with a Trump executive order rescinding the 2022 requirement that all federal law enforcement agents use body cameras.
But at least two other federal law enforcement agencies within the Justice Department — the U.S. Marshals Service and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — are still requiring body cameras, according to their spokespeople. The FBI referred questions about its body camera policy to the Justice Department, which declined to comment.
The Justice Department started requiring that its federal agents wear the devices in 2021 under the Biden administration in the wake of the protests over George Floyd’s murder the previous summer. In May 2022, then-President Joe Biden issued an executive order expanding the use of body cameras to all federal law enforcement officers.
In January 2025, the incoming Trump administration rescinded that order.