foreign-assistance

1. September 19, 2026News4 receipts6 min

   The annual determination naming the world's drug-producing countries carries its statutory evidence on four pages that were scanned as pictures, so the only part of the document a computer can read is the part with no facts in it.

   Presidential Determination 2026-23, signed September 11 and published September 18, names 23 major drug transit or drug producing countries and designates four of them — Afghanistan, Bolivia, Burma and Colombia — as having failed demonstrably to meet their counternarcotics obligations. Three of the four get a national-interest waiver keeping their U.S. assistance; Afghanistan does not. Venezuela, decertified last year, is not decertified this year. The determination's own text contains no cultivation figures, no seizure volumes and no overdose numbers. Every number in the document sits in the four memoranda of justification that section 706 requires, and those four pages were published as scanned images: the Federal Register's text version prints them as 'GRAPHIC, TIFF OMITTED' and the PDF has no text layer for them. Afghanistan's justification, the one country denied a waiver, contains no figure of any kind.

   Also filed underfederal-registerpresidential-determinationdrug-policytransparency

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