I was in a law enforcement agency and what you describe is common. The agency at the end of my career was nothing like it was in the beginning. It was much better then but as you note with the FBI, the source of new hires was different. The "looked like the population at large" concept is totally garbage. Winning basketball teams do not look like the population at large. Effective military units do not look like the population at large. All careers have special skill sets that are not available or present in the population at large. Same goes for doctors, teachers, plumbers etc. And the great lie that a college degree means success or even that it denotes some kind of intelligence, knowledge or ability is a falsehood. A college degree means the person had the money to pay for the classes and went to most of them. I hope the new administration can make positive changes and bring some of the government agencies back to organizations that have integrity and are not political, but it is a heavy lift. Unionization of government workers has been a disaster sadly. My agency required a psych and poly for employment and candidates with a certain level of narcissism and aggression were filtered out. Seems like something the FBI should be doing.
In 1945, when MacArthur asked the Japanese Government to draft a new democratic constitution, the government deliberated for months and then handed him a minimally revised copy of the Meiji Constitution. So he had his staff draft what he wanted, had it roughly translated into bad Japanese and convened a meeting with the government. He locked the doors and plied them with tea and coffee until their bladders were bursting, whereupon they signed the hated document. This is what you do when you inherit a hostile bureaucracy.
Very valuable insights. Corporate HR works much the same way as the FBI has, with similar results. I saw first hand woke HR folks focused on limiting leaders' ability to hire whom they wanted because they didn't "fit the bill" (e.g., too white, too male, and too "boomer").
"It’s a daunting task. Taking a wrecking ball to the current internal structure is only half the solution. Fixing what is broken by introducing hundreds of new management personnel into the ranks, while at the same time working to cull the resistance from among the Special Agent work force will be the more lasting legacy of what Patel leaves behind when his time is done."
___
Yes, it is a daunting task and, yes, it should be done with all deliberate speed.
Fortunately, the way I see it, the Dems have suffered a massive loss... mostly of their own design as they messed up everything they touched... combine that with the fact that they have a thin to non-existent bench and they need to fight their own civil war and try to field a viable 2028 candidate and... I don't think they have time to do all that and win in 2028.
That puts a Republican in as POTUS after, hopefully, 4 years of better news (with the GOP avoiding doing stupid things) than the last 4 we've just experienced under the Dems and... the way I see it, there's a really good chance that the GOP will hold the WH for the next 8, probably, 12 years.
So, while fixing the FBI needs to be done with all deliberate speed, and given the analysis of how agents are recruited and then move through the ranks and into management, I'd think that at the end of 12 years we have a real chance of fixing a fatally flawed organization and putting it on a righteous path.
It's going to be a challenge to accomplish that. Do civil service protections still apply if the entire FBI is disbanded? Move the better agents to the Marshals, the other people can have jobs with the forest service grading trails.
My understanding is that President Trump will reverse the “all of government DEI””(implemented by Biden) so that meritocracy, and equality, not equity will allow every agency to have it’s mission determine its workforce. It is bothersome that alpha males are displaced in employment by beta’s, especially for an organization that wants to duplicate the population as much as possible. It’s laughable.
I prosecuted a 3x murder decades ago. The first one was dumped on remote Army land. The FBI worked it, to my dismay. In their Tyvek bunny suits, they turned away my trusted coroner--and his video camera.
Just before trial I inspected a large garbage bag full of clothes and trash from suspect's trunk. I personally found a distinctive designer button. It matched the victim's designer jeans that were missing a button on the back pocket.
None of the FBI crime scene photos showed that pants pocket.
I also inspected a smashed photo frame seized from the home where the pregnant girl was strangled. Why did the reports ignore this? The SAC said their van flew open as they turned a corner and the frame fell out and shattered
Oddly, the FBI cut 3 pieces of blood spattered sheetrock from the home--from 3 different people. Not one matched the victim.
She hated all prosecutors but I was her favorite. During a pretrial conference in chambers I commented that I always disclose everything. She replied, "You're a jackass." The judge just laughed.
Another judge who was watching us spar from the doorway did a 180 and hightailed it.
I was a GS-1811-13 for an IG Office of Investigations. When we started conducting Medicare investigations Buck Revell was the SAC in OKC. He called our S/A in OKC in to the OKC Field Office and told him to go do his investigations and then bring the results to him and he would decide what would be done with the case. Our S/A had a friendly AUSA and that never happened, but we understood the methodology. Later Congress bestowed $1 Billion USD on Medicare and Medicaid Fraud, Waste and Abuse efforts. Congress refused full law enforcement authorization because of DoJ resistance at the behest of the Bureau management. It was made known to all the IGs, but particularly HHS, that unless an MOU agreeing to the Bureau "sharing" cases (and financing) happened, none of the IG 1811s would be appointed Special Deputy US Marshals. Most Bureau S/As generally were fine back then (I retired in 1997), but they certainly were lost in working Healthcare White Collar Crime.
Edit: I should point out that after 11 September the Bureau found it had problems other than other Federal agencies and dropped opposition to Congressional passage of full law enforcement authority for the IG Offices of Investigation 1811s. Besides, they had the MOUs in hand.
“In fact, quite the opposite is too often true. If you are an FBI Agent, and you don’t shoot that well, or you don’t really like sitting and doing surveillance for long periods of time, or you don’t like going on search warrants and spending hours cataloguing evidence, or you don’t like going through thousands of pages of financial records trying to figure out a fraud — the one way to escape all those things you don’t like is to raise your hand and volunteer to become a supervisor. The outcome is just what you expect — Agents who are not great at the actual work of being an Agent tend to move into management to escape the parts of being an Agent they didn’t like or weren’t good at.”
I have tried several times and several methods to get a note to you, to no avail, because my contribution is very messed up. Please get in touch with me by email. Thanks ~JD
I was in a law enforcement agency and what you describe is common. The agency at the end of my career was nothing like it was in the beginning. It was much better then but as you note with the FBI, the source of new hires was different. The "looked like the population at large" concept is totally garbage. Winning basketball teams do not look like the population at large. Effective military units do not look like the population at large. All careers have special skill sets that are not available or present in the population at large. Same goes for doctors, teachers, plumbers etc. And the great lie that a college degree means success or even that it denotes some kind of intelligence, knowledge or ability is a falsehood. A college degree means the person had the money to pay for the classes and went to most of them. I hope the new administration can make positive changes and bring some of the government agencies back to organizations that have integrity and are not political, but it is a heavy lift. Unionization of government workers has been a disaster sadly. My agency required a psych and poly for employment and candidates with a certain level of narcissism and aggression were filtered out. Seems like something the FBI should be doing.
In 1945, when MacArthur asked the Japanese Government to draft a new democratic constitution, the government deliberated for months and then handed him a minimally revised copy of the Meiji Constitution. So he had his staff draft what he wanted, had it roughly translated into bad Japanese and convened a meeting with the government. He locked the doors and plied them with tea and coffee until their bladders were bursting, whereupon they signed the hated document. This is what you do when you inherit a hostile bureaucracy.
Very valuable insights. Corporate HR works much the same way as the FBI has, with similar results. I saw first hand woke HR folks focused on limiting leaders' ability to hire whom they wanted because they didn't "fit the bill" (e.g., too white, too male, and too "boomer").
"It’s a daunting task. Taking a wrecking ball to the current internal structure is only half the solution. Fixing what is broken by introducing hundreds of new management personnel into the ranks, while at the same time working to cull the resistance from among the Special Agent work force will be the more lasting legacy of what Patel leaves behind when his time is done."
___
Yes, it is a daunting task and, yes, it should be done with all deliberate speed.
Fortunately, the way I see it, the Dems have suffered a massive loss... mostly of their own design as they messed up everything they touched... combine that with the fact that they have a thin to non-existent bench and they need to fight their own civil war and try to field a viable 2028 candidate and... I don't think they have time to do all that and win in 2028.
That puts a Republican in as POTUS after, hopefully, 4 years of better news (with the GOP avoiding doing stupid things) than the last 4 we've just experienced under the Dems and... the way I see it, there's a really good chance that the GOP will hold the WH for the next 8, probably, 12 years.
So, while fixing the FBI needs to be done with all deliberate speed, and given the analysis of how agents are recruited and then move through the ranks and into management, I'd think that at the end of 12 years we have a real chance of fixing a fatally flawed organization and putting it on a righteous path.
It's going to be a challenge to accomplish that. Do civil service protections still apply if the entire FBI is disbanded? Move the better agents to the Marshals, the other people can have jobs with the forest service grading trails.
You had me at decapitate...
I don't think it's worth saving. Neither is the BATFE. Just de-fund them.
My understanding is that President Trump will reverse the “all of government DEI””(implemented by Biden) so that meritocracy, and equality, not equity will allow every agency to have it’s mission determine its workforce. It is bothersome that alpha males are displaced in employment by beta’s, especially for an organization that wants to duplicate the population as much as possible. It’s laughable.
I prosecuted a 3x murder decades ago. The first one was dumped on remote Army land. The FBI worked it, to my dismay. In their Tyvek bunny suits, they turned away my trusted coroner--and his video camera.
Just before trial I inspected a large garbage bag full of clothes and trash from suspect's trunk. I personally found a distinctive designer button. It matched the victim's designer jeans that were missing a button on the back pocket.
None of the FBI crime scene photos showed that pants pocket.
I also inspected a smashed photo frame seized from the home where the pregnant girl was strangled. Why did the reports ignore this? The SAC said their van flew open as they turned a corner and the frame fell out and shattered
Oddly, the FBI cut 3 pieces of blood spattered sheetrock from the home--from 3 different people. Not one matched the victim.
Yes, I had to disclose these details to the defense attorney who had always hated me.
She hated all prosecutors but I was her favorite. During a pretrial conference in chambers I commented that I always disclose everything. She replied, "You're a jackass." The judge just laughed.
Another judge who was watching us spar from the doorway did a 180 and hightailed it.
I was a GS-1811-13 for an IG Office of Investigations. When we started conducting Medicare investigations Buck Revell was the SAC in OKC. He called our S/A in OKC in to the OKC Field Office and told him to go do his investigations and then bring the results to him and he would decide what would be done with the case. Our S/A had a friendly AUSA and that never happened, but we understood the methodology. Later Congress bestowed $1 Billion USD on Medicare and Medicaid Fraud, Waste and Abuse efforts. Congress refused full law enforcement authorization because of DoJ resistance at the behest of the Bureau management. It was made known to all the IGs, but particularly HHS, that unless an MOU agreeing to the Bureau "sharing" cases (and financing) happened, none of the IG 1811s would be appointed Special Deputy US Marshals. Most Bureau S/As generally were fine back then (I retired in 1997), but they certainly were lost in working Healthcare White Collar Crime.
Edit: I should point out that after 11 September the Bureau found it had problems other than other Federal agencies and dropped opposition to Congressional passage of full law enforcement authority for the IG Offices of Investigation 1811s. Besides, they had the MOUs in hand.
“In fact, quite the opposite is too often true. If you are an FBI Agent, and you don’t shoot that well, or you don’t really like sitting and doing surveillance for long periods of time, or you don’t like going on search warrants and spending hours cataloguing evidence, or you don’t like going through thousands of pages of financial records trying to figure out a fraud — the one way to escape all those things you don’t like is to raise your hand and volunteer to become a supervisor. The outcome is just what you expect — Agents who are not great at the actual work of being an Agent tend to move into management to escape the parts of being an Agent they didn’t like or weren’t good at.”
This is also true in public schools and colleges.
@SHIPWRECKEDCREW
I have tried several times and several methods to get a note to you, to no avail, because my contribution is very messed up. Please get in touch with me by email. Thanks ~JD
Hi Jean -- do you have an X account? I'll follow you back and we can DM there.
@CaptQuimby It says I can't message you