FBI DIRECTOR KASH PATEL: We have made America safer in just one year
On February 20, 2025, I had the honor of being confirmed as the Ninth Director of the FBI.
In that time, much has happened. Under President Donald Trump’s leadership, the FBI and our partners at the state, local and federal level have helped deliver one of the safest periods America has seen in decades.
When I sat before the Senate for my confirmation, I promised to refocus the FBI on its core mission: crush violent crime and defend the homeland, strengthen transparency and rebuild public trust. One year in, my team and I have worked every day to turn those words into action. We delivered historic results.
From 2024 to 2025, the FBI saw a 197% increase in arrests, from 34,000 to 67,000. We disrupted 1,800 gangs and criminal enterprises, a 210% increase. Agents seized more than 2,100 kilos of deadly fentanyl — enough to kill 150 million Americans — up 31%. That mission also extended overseas, where my trip to Beijing resulted in a historic agreement to shut off the flow of fentanyl precursor chemicals at the source, directly targeting the supply chains poisoning American communities. Arrests tied to Nihilistic Violent Extremism, including offenders who prey on children, rose 490%. More than 6,200 child victims were located, up 22%. Espionage arrests increased 35%. We captured six of the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted fugitives in one year — two more than the entirety of the prior administration — a group collectively on the run for more than 50 years, including Ryan Wedding. Nationwide, the murder rate fell by a record 20%, a level not seen in a century.
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President Trump let good cops be cops while giving us the resources needed to execute the mission. The results speak for themselves.
But the success of this administration and this FBI goes well beyond the numbers. Over the last year, quiet but consequential transformations have taken place inside the Bureau — changes many Americans may never see on cable news or social media, but which have paid significant dividends.
From day one, we reoriented the FBI to meet modern threats with four clear priorities: Crush Violent Crime, Defend the Homeland, Restore Public Trust and enforce fierce organizational accountability. Under the prior administration, violent crime barely cracked the top ten FBI priorities. Today, it is a central focus, which is why violent crime arrests doubled to more than 30,000 in 2025.
Shifting resources to defending the homeland helped us capture some of the most wanted criminals in the world: Nicholas Maduro, wanted by the Department of Justice for narcoterrorism; Mohammad Sharifullah, an alleged key ISIS operative in the Abbey Gate suicide bombing in Kabul; and Zubayr Al-Bakoush, a key coconspirator in the 2012 Benghazi attack that killed four Americans: Chris Stevens, Sean Smith, Tyrone Woods, and Glen Doherty. We also disrupted and stopped three separate terror plots during the holiday season, preventing potential mass-casualty attacks and ensuring Americans could celebrate safely.
To restore transparency and oversight, we produced more than 40,000 pages of documents to Congress in our first year alone, a level of disclosure that represents more than double the combined document production of my predecessors.
We reduced the Bureau’s dependence on bloated Washington, D.C. bureaucracy and put safety and security resources back into Main Street America. We moved 1,000 agents out of the National Capital Region into field offices across the country, with 1,000 more intelligence and support personnel to follow this year. We also ignited the advanced training facility at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, including the first-ever law enforcement counter-UAS training program.
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We restructured operations so that field offices no longer report through a single bottleneck at headquarters. Dividing offices into regional structures increased accountability and responsiveness to the public. We eliminated units that failed the mission, including the politicized CR-15 squad, removed personnel who acted unethically, and rebuilt leadership around results.
The FBI is now faster and more responsive, with a heavier focus on technology. We established the Director’s Strategic Information Center (DSIC), a fully overhauled information hub focused on proactive threat identification and 24/7 monitoring of critical incidents to dramatically improve response times. We also launched a Technology Working Group, led by Dan Bongino, to help strengthen national security infrastructure through artificial intelligence and enhanced biometric coordination with interagency partners. Rather than continuing a patchwork approach, we engaged private-sector partners to rebuild core systems and expanded the FBI’s leadership role in the National Counterintelligence Task Force to better coordinate efforts against hostile intelligence actors targeting the United States.
After decades of delay and excess, President Trump facilitated the deal to shut down the Hoover Building project. We canceled a minimum $5 billion taxpayer-funded plan that would not have opened for at least a decade and instead moved toward utilizing the existing Ronald Reagan Building, providing a safe and modern headquarters at a fraction of the cost to the American people.
Perhaps most importantly, we made it a top priority for field leaders to work hand in hand with state and local law enforcement. Last year, we created a series of Homeland Security Task Forces — historic partnerships with state officials focused on removing violent criminals from American streets. In Virginia, that effort resulted in nearly 600 arrests in just one month. We replicated this model in Memphis and Washington, D.C. under the President’s Task Force. In those two cities alone, violent crime is down 30%, while homicides are down nearly 70% in D.C. and 50% in Memphis. We also established the first-ever Law Enforcement Partner Engagement Council (LEPEC), giving local law enforcement a permanent seat at the table inside the FBI.
By the numbers, President Trump’s FBI delivered a record year. But the institutional changes implemented over the last year go far beyond statistics, arrests, or headlines. We have rebuilt and remade the FBI into an organization designed to better serve the American people and keep the country safer for decades to come, alongside our partners at the Department of Justice who continue to prosecute bad actors and hold them accountable.
As for us, we will continue to put the Mission First.