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The Trump administration is preparing to lower the recruitment standards for F.B.I. agents, eliciting alarm from many agents who worry that the move will undermine the agency’s primary mission of conducting complex investigations and tracking threats to national security.
Under a plan pushed by the director, Kash Patel, and his deputy, Dan Bongino, the F.B.I. will start welcoming new classes of recruits who will receive less training and no longer be required to have a college degree, according to people familiar with the plan who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe it.
The shift comes as the agency anticipates losing more than 5,000 employees by September, largely as a result of agents, analysts and others taking severance or early retirement packages offered by the Trump administration to try to reduce the budget.
Instead of spending about 18 weeks training at the academy in Quantico, Va., the group of agents, tentatively scheduled to start in October, will receive eight weeks, according to the people. And the agents will no longer need to fulfill a longstanding requisite for joining the bureau: a bachelor’s degree.
Lowering recruiting standards will allow the F.B.I. to draw deeper from the ranks of other federal law enforcement agencies, specifically a category of criminal investigators classified in the federal system as 1811s. Investigators with that designation work at dozens of agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, inspector general offices and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
The new plan, current and former agents say, seems to be part of a larger effort by Mr. Patel to have the bureau focus more on street crime, rather than on complicated cases touching on financial fraud, public corruption and national security. Doing so, they added, will erode the bureau’s reputation as an elite law enforcement agency, known for its selectiveness about its recruits.
