114.8.30(六) Samedi 30 août 2025
The Trump administration is preparing to
lower the recruitment standards for FBI agents, eliciting alarm from many
agents who worry that the move will undermine the agency’s primary mission of conducting
complex investigations and tracking treats to national security.
Under a plan pushed by the director, Kash
Patel, and his deputy, Dan Bongino, the FBI will start welcoming new classes of
recruits who will receive less training and no longer be required to have a
college degree, according to people familiar with the plan who spoke on the
condition of anonymity to describe it.
The shift comes as the agency anticipates
losing more than 5,000 employees by September, largely as a result of agents,
analysts and others taking severance or early retirement packages offered by
the Trump administration to try to reduce the budget.
Instead of spending about 18 weeks training
at the academy in Quantico, Virginia, the group of agents, tentatively scheduled
to start in October, will receive eight weeks, according to the people. And the
agents will no longer need to fulfill a long-standing requisite for joining the
bureau: a bachelor’s degree.
Lowering recruiting standards will allow
the FBI to draw deeper from the ranks of other federal law enforcement agencies,
specifically a category of criminal investigators classified in the federal
system as 1811s. Investigators with that designation work at dozens of
agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, inspector general
offices and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
The new plan, current and former agents
say, seems to be part of a larger effort by Patel to have the bureau focus more
on street crime, rather than on complicated cases touching on financial fraud,
public corruption and national security. Doing so, they added, will erode the
bureau’s reputation as an elite law enforcement agency, known for its
selectiveness about its recruits.
The FBI declined to comment, leaving its reason for the drastic changes unclear, particularly given that Patel has repeatedly promoted the agency’s record recruiting numbers. (Devlin Barrett and Adam Goldman)
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