The Trump administration is preparing to lower the recruitment standards for F.B.I. agents, eliciting alarm from many agents who worry that the move will undermine the agency’s primary mission of conducting complex investigations and tracking threats to national security.
Under a plan pushed by the director, Kash Patel, and his deputy, Dan Bongino, the F.B.I. 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, Va., 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 longstanding requisite for joining the bureau: a bachelor’s degree.
Lowering recruiting standards will allow the F.B.I. 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 Mr. 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 F.B.I. declined to comment, leaving its reason for the drastic changes unclear, particularly given that Mr. Patel himself has repeatedly promoted the agency’s record recruiting numbers.
Chris O’Leary, a former F.B.I. agent and senior counterterrorism official, called the plan the latest example of “generational destruction” at the agency.
If the bureau’s leaders “knew anything about leading organizations,” he said, “they would know that when you lower the standards, your mission effectiveness goes down with that, because not only does the capability of each individual agent decline, but your reputation, both domestically and globally, takes a hit.”
The announcement this week that the Missouri attorney general, Andrew Bailey, who has scant experience as an agent, would join Mr. Bongino as a deputy director was yet another sign of the lack of management expertise atop the agency, Mr. O’Leary added. Collectively, Mr. Patel and Mr. Bongino have the least experience of any pair to lead the bureau.
Mr. O’Leary said the apparent diminution of Mr. Bongino’s role while lowering the recruiting standards only added to the concern that the F.B.I. suffered from a lack of strong senior managers and may “do the bidding of the administration, no matter what it is.”
Current and former agents said they worried that the changes would transform the bureau from an investigative agency focused on national security into something more akin to a federal police force. One of Mr. Patel’s favorite sayings is “let good cops be cops,” which grates on many agents who privately point out that they are not, in fact, cops.
That appears to be shifting.
In recent days, Mr. Patel has signaled that he wants all agents to devote some of their work hours to fighting violent crime. As more than 100 F.B.I. agents were abruptly drafted into patrolling the streets in the nation’s capital as part of the president’s takeover of local law enforcement, agents and some analysts have been pulled off their regular duties to help the police.
The F.B.I. has always worked closely with the local police, playing a supporting role in fighting violent crime.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, however, the agency restructured to prioritize national security threats. Under Mr. Patel, though, current and former agents describe receiving urgent new priorities almost weekly, delaying and interrupting white-collar investigations, public corruption work and counterintelligence — the kinds of cases that often take years to reach a conclusion.
Already, several current and former F.B.I. agents describe a kind of whipsaw effect from the constant shift in orders, pulling them away from their regular duties for many days at a time and only deepening concerns that some important detail to a national security or complex investigation will be missed.
The rushed directives include sending agents to assist with immigration enforcement, to patrol streets in Washington and to repeatedly review investigative documents about the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, a former friend of the president.
Since Mr. Patel took office, the F.B.I. has had its ranks diminished and its institutional experience sharply reduced, in part because of a series of dismissals of agents who appeared to have displeased the Trump administration. In seeking Senate confirmation, Mr. Patel pledged that agents would receive due process before being fired. But he has “failed to honor that commitment,” the F.B.I. Agents Association wrote to its members on Wednesday.
Adding to the losses, the Trump administration has offered agents, analysts and others severance or early retirement packages, in an effort to reduce the budget. That means the bureau may lose more than 5,000 employees.
In recent years, the F.B.I. has employed around 37,000 people, including roughly 13,000 special agents. After the departures, some bureau officials expect to have about 11,000 special agents.
The proposed changes at the F.B.I. come as police departments across the country are lowering or considering lowering their own hiring standards as they struggle to recruit.
“Nationwide, law enforcement departments are facing both a recruitment and retention crisis,” said Heidi S. Bonner, the chair of criminal justice and criminology at East Carolina University. As a result, she said, “agencies at all levels are lowering barriers to entry, whether it’s education, work history, age or tattoos.”
Some standards, like rules about tattoos, are probably dated and can be done away with, she said. Others, like minimum age requirements, are generally considered important measures of maturity and judgment when giving people the power to make arrests.
Recently, ICE, for example, lowered its recruiting standards, particularly the age when someone can join, and no longer requires new hires to take a five-week Spanish-language course.