The United States Senate voted on Tuesday to prevent the Department of Justice from ever again orchestrating a gun-running program like the highly controversial "Fast and Furious" operation in which American agents sold high-powered duns to known members of Mexican drug cartels.

The vote was 99-0, according to the Associated Press, ushering in a bill that will severely curtail any such future operations.  Any such operations conducted in the future must be more tightly controlled and monitored, according to the Senate legislation.

Legislators say they plan to go much further in their efforts to curb such underground gun running in the future.

The vote was "just the first step towards ensuring that such a foolish operation can never be repeated by our own law enforcement," said the amendment's sponsor, Texas Senator John Cornyn, according to the AP.

President Obama said in an interview with ABC News that “people who have screwed up will be held accountable.”

“Our overarching goal consistently has been to say we’ve got a responsibility not only to stop drugs from flowing north, we’ve also got a responsibility to make sure we are not helping to either arm or finance these drug cartels in Mexico,” Obama told ABC News.

The "Fast and Furious" program seems to have started in 2009, according to Forbes, when federal agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives allowed weapons to be illegally purchased in the United States and smuggled across the border into Mexico.

The operation was so secret that Mexican authorities weren't even told of the sanctioned flow of weapons into their county, Forbes reports, and into the hands of known -- and violent -- drug cartels.

The discovery of two weapons associated with the controversial program at the scene of the murder of a U.S. border patrol agent, Brian Terry, in December 2010, brought nation-wide negative attention and spurred a Congressional investigation.

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