Kash Patel, FBI Director, Plans to Move Hundreds of Agents to Field Offices

The F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, told bureau officials on Friday that he wanted to send 1,000 agents from the Washington area to field offices across the country, with another 500 support staff members reassigned to the bureau’s sprawling campus in Alabama, people familiar with the matter said.

Mr. Patel, newly sworn in as director after being narrowly confirmed by the Senate, was widely expected to thin out the headquarters and other offices in the Capitol region. But the speed with which he has moved to do so has caught officials off guard and prompted concerns over the disruptions it might cause across the agency.

His timeline for identifying the employees who would go to field offices and Huntsville, Ala., was not immediately clear. Two former senior F.B.I. officials familiar with the matter said that agents would be sent to cities with high crime rates.

In a statement, the F.B.I. said: “Director Patel has made clear his promise to the American public that F.B.I. agents will be in communities focused on combating violent crime. He has directed F.B.I. leadership to implement a plan to put this promise into action.”

Mr. Patel had promised to shake up the bureau last year in an interview, making clear his hostility toward an agency he saw as biased against conservatives.

“I’d shut down the F.B.I. Hoover Building on Day 1 and reopen it the next day as a museum of the ‘deep state,’” Mr. Patel said on the podcast “The Shawn Ryan Show.” “Then, I’d take the 7,000 employees that work in that building and send them across America to chase down criminals. Go be cops. You’re cops — go be cops.”

How Mr. Patel reached his decision is not clear, but a group of former and current agents on his advisory team have been taking stock of the bureau’s operations. In an email to the work force on Friday, Mr. Patel said he would be “streamlining our operations at headquarters while bolstering the presence of field agents across the nation.”

Mr. Patel is not the first director to try to reduce ranks of agents at F.B.I. headquarters.

In the 1990s, another F.B.I. director, Louis Freeh, tried a similar approach. Shortly after becoming director, he relocated hundreds of agents and supervisors from desk jobs in the capital and other offices onto the streets.

Even before Mr. Patel took office, the Justice Department ordered the forced retirements of several senior workers for reasons that remain unclear, eliminating personnel who collectively had vast experience as agents and at the bureau.

Support staff on the seventh floor of headquarters, where top officials sit, were told to relocate to another floor, including the former director’s secretary. Mr. Patel has indicated his desire for a clean break from Christopher A. Wray, the previous director, who resigned before Mr. Trump took office.

At his Senate confirmation hearing, Mr. Patel sought to explain his pledge to drastically overhaul the bureau. He said that there were about 11,000 F.B.I. employees out of around 38,000 working in the Capitol and surrounding areas like Quantico, Va., where the bureau’s training academy is based. Quantico is also home to the Critical Incident Response Group, which includes behavioral analysts, tactical teams, hostage negotiators and preparing agents for going undercover.

“I will do that over and over and over again because the American people deserve the resources, not in Washington, D.C., but in the rest of the country,” he told senators last month.

Relocating F.B.I. employees is expensive and doing so would come as President Trump has prioritized a cost-cutting initiative led by the billionaire Elon Musk. The administration has already asked for a list of probationary employees, among them nearly a thousand agents the bureau has to justify keeping, eliciting the possibility of swift reductions across the agency.

Former F.B.I. officials raised questions about where agents and support personnel should go and which field offices needed the resources.

“Where is he going to put them?” said Chris Piehota, who retired as a senior F.B.I. executive official in 2020. He cautioned that Mr. Patel would have to conduct an inventory of programs and assemble his leadership team before making such big decisions.

“You need to get in there and see behind the curtains,” he said. “He’s got a difficult balance to maintain between recalibrating the organization and still maintaining the operational effectiveness of the F.B.I.”

Shortly after being sworn in by Attorney General Pam Bondi, Mr. Patel expressed his disbelief. “I don’t really fully believe it yet,” he said, adding that any future criticism of the bureau be directed at him, not the rank and file. “They deserve better,” he said.