The Trump administration has spent two years claiming executive powers with little historical precedent, from tariffs and mass deportations to National Guard deployments, halted clean energy projects, withheld grants, and accelerated federal contracting. Beneath those public actions, interagency task forces have continued expanding with limited scrutiny.

The model dates to 1979, when the FBI and New York City Police Department formed the Bank Robbery Task Force after several prominent robberies. Their agreement allowed shared records and informants under the principle that cooperation was essential to effective law enforcement.

New York created the first Joint Terrorism Task Force a year later. In 1982, the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces began assembling agencies to pursue transnational cartels and money launderers, while the years after 9/11 brought hundreds of terrorism task forces and broader information sharing.

During Trump’s second term, the administration has created, enlarged, and reorganized task forces throughout the federal bureaucracy. Disclosures about their objectives have been vague, while congressional approval and meaningful court restrictions have largely been absent.

At a February 2025 conference in Columbia, South Carolina, Emil Bove, then the deputy attorney general and now a federal appeals court judge, told federal prosecutors the “gloves are off,” according to a former Justice Department official. He also announced the policy of bombing suspected drug boats rather than interdicting them.

The administration has presented foreign “invasion” and domestic unrest as emergencies requiring consolidated federal power. That theory has been tested in Portland, Los Angeles, and Chicago, where deployments produced chaos before courts disrupted them individually and the administration voluntarily withdrew them.

In Washington, Trump established the D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force, combining six federal agencies and three U.S. Attorney offices. The administration later federalized the District police department for 30 days and deployed thousands of National Guard troops, who are scheduled to remain through at least Trump’s term.

By the end of 2025, the federal surge had produced a 20% annual increase in arrests, mostly for minor misdemeanors. Yet D.C. had already been exceeding its 2024 arrest pace by 20% before the takeover, and immigration enforcement accounted for 40% of arrests during its first two months.

The Memphis Safe Task Force began in September 2025 with more than a dozen federal agencies, including the Department of War, Department of Health and Human Services, and Department of Housing and Urban Development. The administration disclosed little about those agencies’ operations despite requests from Rep. Steve Cohen.

During the summer, a Homeland Security Investigations agent killed a man while responding to his mother’s report that he was experiencing a mental health crisis. Weeks later, two National Guard soldiers killed a man who was 20 years old and carrying a handgun after chasing him shortly before 4 a.m.

One week before the Memphis task force order, local police announced a 25 year low in overall crime. Attorney General Todd Blanche later testified at his confirmation hearing that the effort could serve “as a poster child of what we should do in cities across this country.”

The former Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces had spent more than four decades building an extensive interagency system. Its fusion center combined data from 24 agencies in a “single sign-on, single-query database,” allowing investigators to access records from the FBI, IRS, Homeland Security Investigations, and Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.

Renamed Homeland Security Task Forces, the units shifted away from organized crime syndicates and toward immigration enforcement and smaller criminal cases, according to the former Justice Department official. The administration also “eliminated the requirement with the HSTF for doing financial investigations,” abandoning a foundation of earlier organized crime cases.

Other initiatives have pushed federal data resources toward the administration’s political priorities. The Government Transparency Task Force searches intelligence files for foreign election interference and a “deep state coverup,” while the Task Force to Eliminate Fraud seeks connections between benefit programs, foreign gangs, and terror groups.

Richard Bernstein of the Society for the Rule of Law described an administration using federal agencies on thin statutory claims to accomplish political work it cannot pass through Congress. Courts have rejected some expansive claims, but former federal judge Jeremy Fogel said, “The judiciary cannot manage the administration of federal agencies.”

The administration’s global tariffs may have been struck down, but its Trade Fraud Task Force remains. Brian Frazelle of the Constitutional Accountability Center described “the same pattern of trying to exploit every opening that’s available, any chance to escape court review or limitations on what they want to do.”