On February 25, 2026, ProPublica reported that the Trump administration is loosening restrictions on sharing law enforcement information with the CIA and other intelligence agencies, overriding controls that officials said have been in place for decades to protect the privacy of U.S. citizens. Government officials told ProPublica the changes could give intelligence agencies access to a database of hundreds of millions of documents, from FBI case files and banking records to criminal investigations of labor unions, that touch on the activities of law-abiding Americans.
The database, called Compass, holds some 770 million records and was run by the Justice Department's Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force (OCDETF), which the administration shut down in 2025 and replaced with Homeland Security Task Forces designed by White House adviser Stephen Miller. According to ProPublica, the administration is still deciding how Compass will operate, but intelligence agencies and the Pentagon have taken technical steps to connect to it if permitted, the National Counterterrorism Center under Joe Kent has pressed to manage it over FBI and DEA objections, and the DEA has already authorized the transfer of at least some case files.
Officials said the steps were taken with almost no public acknowledgment or notification to Congress, and some officials said the moves could violate rules barring intelligence agencies from gathering information on Americans inside the U.S. The administration says the sharing is lawful under post-9/11 statutes and needed to fight drug cartels and gangs it has designated as terrorist organizations. The limits being loosened trace to the reforms that followed Watergate-era revelations that the CIA spied on anti-war and civil rights activists. Sen. Ron Wyden said, “The potential for abuse of that information is staggering.” Most of the officials ProPublica interviewed spoke on condition of anonymity.
Correction (October 2, 2026): The entry's headline said Trump gave the CIA access to the files; ProPublica reported the administration is moving to loosen the rules and that the changes could give such access, with the database's operation still undecided. The entry's date was corrected from March 11 to February 25, 2026, the date of ProPublica's report. A paragraph linking this to the FBI director's jet use and the attorney general's handling of ethics probes was removed because no source in the entry supports it.