The FBI is having trouble recruiting new agents, the Wall Street Journal reported this week.
A sharp decline in the number of applicants for special agent positions, long considered among the most prestigious in US law enforcement, continued last year, from a peak of 68,500 in 2009 to 11,500 last year, the report said.
“We had a lot of discussion internally about why the number of special agent applicants were fluctuating so much over the years. We were trying to figure out what’s the story,” said Peter Sursi, the man in charge of recruitment for the FBI.
According to the FBI, the number of already employed special agents has also dropped somewhat over the past few years, from 14,050 in 2014 to 13,906 in 2017.
At first blush it might seem that a certain polarizing political figure disparaging the honor and the trustworthiness of the FBI on TV and on Twitter every day might play a role in lowered enthusiasm.
From special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into US President Donald Trump’s ties to Russia, which Trump has frequently called a witch hunt, to his spats with former FBI acting director Andrew McCabe and others, scarcely a week goes by without his impugning the law enforcement agency.
It does seem that under the Trump administration, positive impressions of the FBI, at least among Republicans have dropped.
A Pew survey found that while overall support of the FBI has remained positive at 65 percent, since 2017, “the share of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents with a positive view of the bureau has fallen 16 percentage points, from 65 percent to 49 percent.”
Similarly, a Gallup poll found that the percentage of Republicans saying the FBI did an “excellent” or “good” job dropped from 62 percent in 2014 to 49 percent in 2017.
However, the decrease in applications began long before Trump was president, said the FBI, which thinks the problem is economics, not politics.
“Our recruiters never had to actively encourage special agent applicants to apply before,” Sursi told the Journal. “But the labor market is tight for most employers these days, with more jobs than qualified workers. We have to adjust our strategies to be a competitive option.”
Among the bureau’s efforts has been a sustained social media campaign under the hashtag #UnexpectedAgent.
A scroll through the hashtag on Twitter will find FBI departments hoping to open people’s eyes to the possibility of employment with the bureau, particularly women and minorities, who have long been underrepresented.
White men currently account for 67 percent of special agents.
The FBI is not alone in this.
The US Army, Navy and other military branches have seen recruitment shortages, according to the New York Times and the Army Times.
Police forces across the nation have also had trouble recruiting. The total number of full-time sworn officers has dropped 23,000 since 2013 to about 700,000, said a National Public Radio report, which called the officer shortage “a quiet crisis in American policing.”
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.