When it comes to FBI personnel problems during Director Kash Patel’s tenure, the principal problem has been the aggressive political purge that has unfolded over the last 20 months. But also let’s not overlook the related problem — over who’s coming into the bureau, and not just who’s headed out.
The Associated Press reported:
The FBI is dropping a categorical hiring ban on applicants who have had sexual encounters with prostitutes and will instead consider in a more holistic manner at least some candidates who have engaged in the practice in the past, according to people familiar with the matter.
The standards haven’t been eliminated altogether — some applicants, including those who had sexual encounters with prostitutes while serving in a position of public trust, for example, will still be dismissed — but the AP noted that the bureau intends to “allow for consideration of the context of the conduct rather than treat it as grounds for an automatic rejection from the FBI’s hiring process.”
A related report from CBS News added that stealing from an employer or engaging in acts of bestiality are also “no longer automatic deal breakers for applicants to the nation’s top law enforcement agency.”
The same report added, “An FBI spokesperson confirmed that some changes to the eligibility requirements have taken place, but claimed they are limited to a narrow set of circumstances.”
The news was unexpected, though it also fits into a striking pattern. In April, for example, after congressional Republicans and the White House threw an obscene amount of money at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE launched an ambitious hiring spree, which also included lowering its standards.
The AP reported, “Two bankruptcies and six law enforcement jobs in three years. An allegation of lying in a police report to justify a felony charge against an innocent woman — an incident that led to a $75,000 settlement and criticism of his integrity. A third job candidate once failed to graduate from a police academy, then lasted only three weeks in his only job as a police officer. Their common bond: All were hired recently by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement during an unprecedented hiring spree.”
The article added that ICE has been engaged in such “rapid-fire recruitment and hiring” that it has hired new employees “with questionable qualifications” and that applicants with “questionable histories” were brought on “in spite of their past.”
What’s more, it’s not just the FBI and ICE. The Justice Department, for example, lowered its standards for newly hired federal prosecutors. Before that, the Republican administration also lowered standards on the qualifications to serve as an immigration judge.
By some measures, the entirety of the Trump presidency has been a grand experiment in what happens when an administration embraces amateurism and deprofessionalization.
Donald Trump has informally lowered the standards for what it takes to lead the FBI, what it takes to serve in the Cabinet, what it takes to serve as a U.S. attorney, what it takes to be a success in the private sector and what it takes to serve as vice president.
The president himself was, in the recent past, a television reality show host who didn’t know anything about governing, had never served a day in any public post and arguably had no business running to serve as the chief executive of the world’s pre-eminent superpower.
Trumpism, in other words, is defined in large part by a lowering of standards. The ICE example is dramatic, but it’s part of a pattern.
There are real consequences to this: Departments and agencies stripped of professional standards are more easily manipulated.
The more this happens, in other words, the more the White House confronts a more compliant and obedient federal bureaucracy.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
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