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The Trump administration has sought to portray itself as a meritocracy fit for only the most competent employees, despite all evidence to the contrary.
And yet, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, within this purported meritocracy, is reportedly planning to lower its recruitment standards in response to a crisis of the administration’s own making.
As The New York Times reported Thursday:
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,” sources told The Times. The report says this change is being made in response to the projected loss of thousands of agents in September, resulting from early retirements and severance packages some agents have sought as the Trump administration has sought to slash the federal workforce. (The FBI declined to comment to the Times on the reason for the changes.)
The news follows reporting from my colleague Ken Dilanian that the administration’s pressure campaign to force top officials out of the FBI, which has disproportionately affected women and people of color, has prompted demands from Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., that the Justice Department’s inspector general investigate the matter. Dilanian also reported that the FBI would be reinstating a requirement that all agents be able to perform one strict pullup — a requirement that Durbin warned could deplete the number of women agents by 30 percent. Past research has helped bolster this claim.
As for the weakened education and training requirement, there's certainly twisted irony in Trump and his administration breathlessly repeating their bigoted claim that diversity, equity and inclusion policies in the federal government prioritize diversity over merit — only for them to lower their own standards in order to replenish the ranks of one of the most essential crime-fighting organizations in the nation.