FBI counterintelligence squads have dropped to as little as half strength in many field offices as Director Kash Patelsteers the bureau toward the crime and immigration promises President Donald Trump is making on the campaign trail.
In many of the bureau’s 56 field offices, counterintelligence squads have only 50% to 60% of their positions filled, NPR reported Tuesday, citing five people familiar with the matter.
In multiple offices, the number of squads doing that work has been cut in half, according to the report. The five sources spoke on condition of anonymity because of the topic’s sensitivity and fear of retribution.
“It’s terrifying, honestly,” one of the people told NPR. “Threats are growing and we’re facing it with less and less. Not a recipe for success.”
The cuts did not come from a specific order by Patel, according to the report.
Instead, bureau leaders have made clear that resources must go to violent crime, gangs and illegal immigration, which NPR described as top campaign issues for Trump.
Trump has made crime and immigration go-to talking points as he campaigns for Republicans in the midterm elections, according to a PolitiFact review.
At the Republican Party’s midterm convention in Dallas last month, he claimed: “the largest drop in violent crime ever recorded in the history of our country.”
Field offices have pulled agents and analysts off counterintelligence and moved them to those priorities, the people told NPR. The special agents in charge of those offices are not refilling the empty spots, and are instead assigning new agents and analysts to violent crime or immigration.
Patel’s push to move analysts out of headquarters and into field offices has added to the losses, according to the report. Many counterintelligence analysts were shifted to violent crime and gangs after the move, and losing them has made it harder to open new investigations and make sense of evidence.
The bureau has also lost more than 1,500 special agents since Trump returned to office, two people familiar with the matter told NPR. Overall, it has more than 650 fewer agents than it did in January 2025.
“When you lose that knowledge, you don’t just replace it with a brand new agent. You lose the experience and are starting from scratch,” one person said. “There’s a huge learning curve for this work.”
Patel and his leadership team also fired five special agents and a supervisor who worked on Iranian counterintelligence threats days before the Trump administration launched its war on Iran earlier this year, NPR reported. They were among several counterintelligence agents, including some in New York, fired for having worked on investigations of Trump.
Former officials told NPR that counterintelligence threats are silent by nature, making it hard to know when one goes undetected.
A missed terrorist plot is likely to end in an explosion, the report said, while a missed spy operation lets the quiet theft of secrets and technology go on unimpeded.
“If the counterintelligence agents don’t manage to shut down the networks, you lose everything from intellectual property to economic standings in the world, so even something as bad as real government secrets that are highly classified,” said Emily Harding, a former CIA analyst now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
The cuts come as the U.S. is at war with Iran and as China wages what American officials call a relentless campaign to steal government secrets and cutting-edge technology, NPR reported.
Russia also remains a formidable adversary with aggressive intelligence services, the report said.
Former FBI Director Christopher Wray said in 2022 that the bureau had more than 2,000 investigations into Chinese efforts to steal U.S. information or technology, and that it opened a new case roughly every 12 hours to counter Chinese intelligence operations.
“If you have somebody who you think is a potential Russian spy, you need 24/7 coverage of that person, and that’s a lot of manpower to do 24/7 coverage,” Harding told NPR.
Last month, federal prosecutors charged five suspected Russian intelligence operatives with planning attacks in Europe and the U.S., including an alleged assassination plot in Washington, D.C., NPR reported.
“This is false—the FBI maintains a robust counterintelligence operation across the enterprise,” an FBI spokesperson said in response to NPR’s questions about the shortages.
The spokesperson said the bureau has expanded its counterintelligence task forces to more than 1,500 personnel, including staff from partner agencies and state and local law enforcement.
“Anonymous sources who criticize our counterintelligence capabilities are disconnected from reality,” the spokesperson said.
Patel recently told Congress that the FBI under his leadership has arrested more spies from Russia, China, Iran and North Korea “than any FBI in history.” NPR said it could not independently verify that claim.
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