Trump’s FBI has made Americans less safe

FBI Director Kash Patel during a congressional hearing in Washington, May 7, 2025. Anna Rose Layden/The New York Times)

By The Editorial Board

Only 11 days after President Donald Trump was inaugurated for a second term, his administration began a purge of the FBI that now threatens some of the bureau’s most important missions. His appointees ousted eight of its most experienced managers, including the division heads overseeing national security, cybersecurity and criminal investigations. Several had worked on prosecutions of Jan. 6 rioters or had assisted in the various investigations of Trump, and Emil Bove, then the acting deputy attorney general, said they could not be trusted to carry out the president’s agenda.

That was just the beginning. Over the past five months, many FBI agents, including other top managers and national security experts, have been fired, pressured to leave or transferred to lesser roles. Hundreds have resigned on their own, unwilling to follow the demands of the Trump administration. Their absence has left a vacuum in divisions that are supposed to protect the public. These losses have “obliterated decades of experience in national security and criminal matters at the FBI,” Adam Goldman of The New York Times wrote.

Trump’s playbook for the FBI is plain to see. He is turning it into an enforcement agency for his priorities. He is chasing out agents who might refuse to play along and installing loyalists in their place. He is seeking to remove the threat of investigation for his friends and allies. And he is trying to instill fear in his critics and political opponents. Among his many efforts to weaken American democracy and amass more power for himself, his politicization of the FBI is one of the most blatant.

These developments should unsettle all Americans, regardless of party. As one former Justice Department official told NBC News, the decimation of the bureau’s senior ranks has left it “completely unprepared to respond to a crisis, including the fallout from the current conflict in the Middle East.” Trump’s politicization of the FBI has left it less able to combat terrorism, foreign espionage, biosecurity threats, organized crime, online scams, white-collar crime, drug trafficking and more.

Trump has made clear that he considers the FBI’s first priority to be loyalty. Consider the Signal scandal from this spring, when senior officials disclosed sensitive information in a group chat. In any other administration, the FBI probably would have investigated. Under Trump, the bureau looked the other way.

To carry out this agenda, he chose as its director Kash Patel, whose main qualification is his unquestioning fealty to Trump. In 2022, Patel published a children’s book, “The Plot Against the King,” in which a wizard named Kash saves the day by exposing a conspiracy against King Donald. The next year, Patel published a book titled “Government Gangsters.”

His mission at the FBI is to politicize it. He is dismantling key operations and reshaping the bureau into an instrument of Trump’s political will. Trump spent years baselessly accusing the FBI and the Justice Department of being weaponized against him; now he is turning federal law enforcement into the very thing he claimed it was: a political enforcer. Under Patel, the bureau has assigned agents to pursue long-running MAGA grievances. One example: Patel had his agents dig through documents searching for evidence to support one of Trump’s and the online right’s favorite conspiracy theories, that China somehow helped manipulate the results of the 2020 election.

Among the people whom Patel has scapegoated are the agents he now oversees, which damages the bureau’s morale and its effectiveness. Before taking office, he called the bureau “an existential threat to our republican form of government.” He has described its employees as “political jackals” who tried to “suffocate the truth” in order to rig the 2020 election for Biden. Patel has promoted theories that the FBI paid Twitter to censor conservatives and that it used confidential informants to stir up the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol. There is no evidence to support any of this.

For his deputy director, Patel hired Dan Bongino, a longtime right-wing podcaster. Bongino has called the bureau “the single most corrupt law enforcement institution” in America and a “full-blown leftist political action committee.” Together they began singling out agents who had worked on prosecutions of the Jan. 6 rioters or the federal indictment of Trump for improperly removing documents from the White House. Many of these agents were fired, pushed to resign or transferred.

The resulting loss of expertise and experience is chilling. The bureau today has fewer people with the skills to prevent crime, political corruption and foreign espionage.

Under Patel, the FBI has also reassigned agents from valuable work to showy efforts that bolster Trump’s political interests. This pattern is clearest with immigration. We acknowledge that an increased focus on border security and deportations is a legitimate change for Trump’s FBI. He won election last year partly because of public dissatisfaction with the Biden administration’s loose border policies, which contributed to the most rapid surge of immigration in American history, much of it illegal.

Presidents rightly have the authority to shape the bureau’s priorities. But the approach of the Trump FBI is nonetheless alarming because of its extremity. The administration is pulling agents away from areas that present true risks to the country and assigning them instead to search for undocumented immigrants who have no criminal record. The effort is part of a governmentwide effort to meet Trump’s arbitrary quota of 3,000 arrests a day. “They have cannibalized field offices to create these immigration squads,” one former agent told us in an interview. “They’re taking highly trained agents, many with advanced degrees and military experience, and using them for perimeter security on ICE roundups. And that means fewer people working to prevent foreign influence or public corruption.”

All law enforcement agencies require foundations of public trust, but because of its troubled history and the ease of political manipulation from Washington, the FBI has a particular need to demonstrate that it deserves the nation’s confidence. Agents, for their part, need to know that their managers and civilian leaders have their backs and don’t consider them to be jackals. They need to know that they are enforcing the law fairly, not being used for a personal or ideological agenda. The public — on which the bureau relies for tips and cooperation — has to trust that agents operate without political bias.

By abusing that trust, Trump, Patel and Bongino have put the reputation and effectiveness of the FBI at risk. In doing so, they are risking the safety of the American public.