What Will Kash Patel Face When He Arrives At FBI HQ On January 20, 2025?

Restructuring The Bureau To Remedy What Ails It Or Turning It Into A Vehicle To Pursue The Malfactors Inside It And Other Aligned Agencies?

The FBI where Kash Patel is set to become Director is an agency that in many respects is unlike any other agency of the federal government. Some of what I explain below has been the subject of commentary by me on X, Spaces, podcasts, and other areas where I have written or commented. But I’ve never put it down in writing all in one place.

But the way the Bureau is structured and operates is largely unknown to the public at large, and the unique qualities that apply to it make understanding the structure and operation important in seeing what it is that Kash Patel will be facing.

Sometimes I’m reluctant to go too deep into the internal mechanics of the FBI because I never worked there. I was never part of the culture no matter how many Special Agents I worked with over 20+ years, or how many I remain in contact with to this day. Occasionally I’m the recipient of communications telling me I got something a little bit wrong, but generally I think I’ve stayed within the bumpers in describing the inner workings of the Bureau as an outsider with a front-row seat for 30+ years.

Because nearly all of my interactions while at DOJ were with squad agents, my views of the Bureau tend to be SA-centric — and that means “anti-management” to a significant degree. There is — and always has been — a division between squad agents and FBI managers. An Agent’s job is an either-or proposition — you remain a working agent assigned to a “squad” with a particular area of enforcement as its priority, or you move into management and your day-to-day job involves overseeing and coordinating work done by Agents - while do almost none of that work yourself. The farther up the management ladder you climb, the farther away you get from the squads where the agents are doing the work, and the management work is “managing lower level managers.”

Over the past 11 years, after leaving DOJ, I’ve met and developed friendships with a few retired FBI senior managers. Included in the group are retired SACs — Special-Agents-In-Charge — all of whom occupied various management positions as they advanced in their careers, mostly in the 1990s and 2000s. Just about every one of them was out of the Bureau by 2012-2015, and each has similar recollections about what they saw happening in the way the Bureau changed internally in the two decades since 2000. All of them, without exception, lament what the Bureau has become — with the same refrain of “It wasn’t like that when I started.”