With an abundance of illegal e-cigarettes available in the U.S., both the Trump and Biden administrations have committed to curtailing the sale of these illicit fruit- and candy-flavored vapes, which are particularly attractive to minors. However, a recent government report indicates that the Department of Justice’s enforcement efforts are not meeting the scale of the issue.
According to the Government Accountability Office report, of the 88 enforcement actions taken by the DOJ between fiscal years 2022 and 2025, 50 were aimed at listing remote e-cigarette sellers as unauthorized businesses. The next most frequent actions, totaling 20, were injunctions to halt legal violations.
This GAO report focused solely on DOJ-involved actions, excluding enforcement measures such as the seizure of over 6 million illegal products by the FDA and U.S. Customs and Border Protection from 2024 to 2025. To highlight the scale, a significant seizure of $76 million worth of products in 2024—3 million vapes—represented roughly 4% of China’s e-cigarette exports to the U.S. in a single month, as noted by Steven Xu, an adjunct assistant professor at the University of Waterloo.
Senator Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), who commissioned the report, emphasized the need for increased efforts to tackle the public health risks posed by illegal vapes.
“This GAO report highlights the FDA and DOJ’s shortcomings in protecting children from lifelong nicotine addiction. Despite judicial mandates and legislative deadlines, numerous hazardous, youth-targeted e-cigarettes remain illegally on the market,” Durbin stated. “FDA and DOJ must utilize their enforcement capabilities instead of succumbing to the tobacco industry.”
Kathy Crosby, president and CEO of the Truth Initiative, a nonprofit against nicotine addiction, echoed this view. “The GAO report shows a troubling disparity between the scale of illegal e-cigarette sales and the federal response to address it,” she said, emphasizing that “this enforcement gap should not be a state responsibility. It is a national concern requiring a unified federal approach, supported by full federal regulatory and enforcement power.”
The Department of Justice did not provide a comment.
As of June 2024, around 6,000 e-cigarette products were on sale in the U.S., according to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Only 41 of these products have received FDA authorization, from brands like Glas, Logic, Juul, NJOY, and R.J. Reynolds Vapor Company. Most illegal vapes are manufactured in China, imported unlawfully, and sold widely in convenience stores, gas stations, and tobacco shops. In 2025, China’s e-cigarette exports to the U.S. totaled $10.6 billion.
Though youth vaping rates have dropped in the U.S. in recent years, health experts caution that 1.6 million children still use e-cigarettes, particularly sweet-flavored ones not approved by the FDA due to their strong appeal to young people.
In June 2024, responding to the surge in illegal e-cigarettes, the government created an inter-agency task force to enhance enforcement against illegal vapes. This task force, led by the DOJ and FDA, includes Customs and Border Protection, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, and the Federal Trade Commission.
The FDA’s capacity to act alone against the influx of illegal vapes is limited to issuing warnings and seeking civil penalties, noted Mitch Zeller, who led the FDA’s tobacco division from 2013 to 2022. He remarked that the FDA “has lacked the necessary backing from law enforcement agencies, beginning with the Justice Department, to rigorously enforce against illicit vaping products.”
Zeller also described it as “disappointing” that the DOJ’s most frequent action was listing unauthorized online e-cigarette sellers for carriers like the U.S. Postal Service.
The majority of illegal vapes are sold in physical locations such as gas stations and vape shops, noted Xu. “There is a mismatch between DOJ’s resources and the real retail environment,” he said via email.
Recently, a group of lawmakers asked the Trump administration to address the influx of illegal vapes during trade discussions with China. Zeller believes that targeting the middlemen—wholesalers and distributors responsible for distributing illegal e-cigarettes to retailers—would be the most effective enforcement action.
“Preventing these products from entering the country is challenging due to the many ports,” Zeller said. “At the retail end, we are dealing with potentially tens of thousands of outlets.” He suggested that targeting one or two major middlemen who facilitate moving the vaping supply from entry points to stores could significantly clean up the market.
STAT’s reporting on chronic health issues is funded by a grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies. Our financial backers do not influence our journalism.
