Trump and Patel have moved the FBI relatively more toward politics and optics and away from the criminal justice mission.
FBI agents were pulled away from their work to focus on immigration, despite that ICE got massive funding and a mass of new ICE agents.
FBI agents determined that people were peacefully protesting and that there was nothing to investigate. The Trump administration ordered them to investigate anyways.
Some FBI agents were pushed out or forced to quit on principle. These were trained agents doing their jobs well, now out of the agency.
The way Trump runs the bureaucracy is similar to how many dictators run their bureaucracies. He hires, promotes, and fires based on loyalty, not competency. Overtime, this makes agencies less effective, less principled, less competent, more corrupt, and more loyal to the dictator. This is how many dictators have ineffective governments, and their people suffer as a result.
“The well-documented problem with these kits is that the compounds they test for are not exclusive to illicit drugs and are, in fact, found in dozens of legal substances. That is to say, they’re better at telling if something isn’t a drug than if it is one. This is why they’re used in laboratory settings as preliminary screeners. But in the criminal justice system, they’re considered probable cause to make an arrest.
As a result, many people have been arrested for absurd items. Over the years, officers have jailed innocent people after drug field kits returned “presumptive positive” results on bird poop, donut glaze, cotton candy, and sand from inside a stress ball.
…
Despite appearing easy to use, the tests can still be performed incorrectly or produce muddy results, which leaves suspects’ fates to the subjective opinions of police officers.”
“”Since June 2025, the Administration has deployed National Guard personnel or active-duty Marine Corps personnel to six U.S. cities: Los Angeles, California; Washington, D.C.; Memphis, Tennessee; Portland, Oregon; Chicago, Illinois; and New Orleans, Louisiana,” the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) responded to a query from Sen. Jeff Merkley (D–Ore.). “The Administration has also kept 200 National Guard personnel mobilized in Texas after they left Chicago. CBO estimates that those deployments (excluding the one to New Orleans, which occurred at the end of the year) cost a total of approximately $496 million through the end of December 2025.””
“”Imagine if we had to go through the process of getting a judicial warrant.”
Those are the complaining words of Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R–La.), who was voicing his support for the actions of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which now claims that its agents have the right to forcibly enter private homes without first obtaining a warrant signed by a judge. According to ICE, its agents may forcibly enter homes in certain immigration enforcement contexts based merely on a so-called “administrative warrant,” which is not actually a warrant at all, but is rather just a piece of paper signed by someone in the executive branch.”
“Thanks to a lack of hiring standards, purposeful federal policy, poor training, and a lack of accountability for bad behavior, ICE is eroding safety and liberty for all Americans.”
The Epstein files Trump released are way over-redacted. Some Congressmen had temporary and limited access to less redacted versions, and they claim they saw an international sex trafficking ring with names of men who appear to have committed crimes.
“No videos or photos showed Epstein victims being sexually abused, none showed any males with any of the nude females, and none contained evidence implicating anyone other than Epstein and Maxwell, then-Assistant U.S. Attorney Maurene Comey wrote in an email for FBI officials last year.
Had they existed, the government “would have pursued any leads they generated,” Comey wrote. “We did not, however, locate any such videos.”
Investigators who scoured Epstein’s bank records found payments to more than 25 women who appeared to be models — but no evidence that he was engaged in prostituting women to other men, prosecutors wrote.”