WASHINGTON — FBI Director Kash Patel broke with the Trump administration Wednesday over a budget proposal that would dramatically slash funding for the bureau, telling lawmakers, “We need more than what has been proposed.”
The 2026 budget proposal released on Friday calls for a funding cut of more than $500 million for the FBI as part of what the White House said was a desire to “reform and streamline” the bureau and reduce “non-law enforcement missions that do not align” with the priorities of President Donald Trump. Patel warned that such a cut would be harmful for the FBI as it reorients priorities to focus on violent crime.
Asked to specify at a House Appropriations subcommittee which positions would need to be cut if the funding reduction was implemented, Patel replied: “At this time, we have not looked at who to cut. We are focusing our energies on how not to have them cut by coming in here and highlighting to you that we can’t do the mission on those 2011 budget levels.”
Rep. Rosa DeLauro, a Connecticut Democrat, pressed Patel for details, saying, “This is your budget. You have to have some idea of what you want to fund or not fund, or where you can cut or not cut, and provide that information” to the Office of Management and Budget.
“That’s the proposed budget — not by the FBI,” Patel replied. “The proposed budget that I put forward is to cover us for for $11.1 billion, which would not have us cut any positions.”
Patel also defended the FBI’s plan to relocate about 1,000 FBI employees from the Washington area to cities around the country, one of the first initiatives he revealed upon being sworn in as director in February.
“Part of the process is not just putting people out sporadically, throwing darts on the map. What we’ve done is we’ve taken a process with the (career employees) at the FBI and said, ‘Where are some of the most violent crime places in America?’” Patel said.
Patel also clashed during one contentious exchange with Democratic Rep. Madeleine Dean of Pennsylvania, who served as a House impeachment manager during the second of two impeachment cases against Trump in his first term.
She asserted that the FBI had become “weaponized” under Patel and confronted him over a book he had authored, saying a list of Trump adversaries he included in it amounted to an “enemies list” and was being used by Trump as a “blueprint for revenge.”
Patel replied that he was the one who had been “targeted by a weaponized FBI,” presumably referring to the fact that he was among the people whose records were secretly seized by the Justice Department years earlier as part of media leak investigations when he was a staffer on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence conducting an investigation into Russian election interference.
“You should read the book because there’s no enemies list (in) that book,” Patel continued. “There are people that violated their constitutional obligations and their duties to the American people, and they were rightly called out. And you should give that book to every one of your constituents so they can read” about it.
“I won’t be doing that,” Dean shot back.
“That’s their loss,” Patel said.