Kash Patel has been a fierce critic of the FBI for years, even vowing to close its headquarters on Day 1 and turn it into a museum in the "deep state".

Now, Patel is a director of the FBI whom he has long criticized. Patel has not closed the Hoover headquarters building and reopened as a museum since taking over more than 100 days ago. But he has begun to try to remake the bureau on a large scale.

He and his deputy, former Secret Service agent and right-wing podcast Dan Bongino have begun redeploying hundreds of agents and analysts from Washington DC to offices across the country, while also shifting the FBI from some of its traditional law enforcement efforts to immigration enforcement.

Meanwhile, under the Trump administration, senior FBI agents were kicked out, and neither the FBI director nor the deputy director had any experience in the bureau or the experience of operating a major law enforcement agency, depriving decades of knowledge and expertise.

Bongino said in an article on X last week that he and Patel will soon have “a majority of our upcoming reform team.”

“The recruitment process may take a little while, but we are approaching the finish line,” he said. “It will help both of us double down on the reform agenda.”

The tremendous nature of the mission before them - leading a 35,000-person agency that investigates everything from foreign spies and terrorists to hackers, bank robbers and white-collar criminals - seems to be settling.

Bongino told Fox's Maria Bartiromo during his seat with Patel last month that he told Fox's Maria Bartiromo when he sat down with Patel: "We came in the morning and had a portfolio of 100-level 10 projects. "To my desk or his desk is 10." This is all day. ”

Patel said in the same interview that his priorities for the bureau are destroying violent crimes, defending the land, strict constitutional responsibility and active constitutional oversight with Congress. He also promised a "wave of transparency," including an investigation into possible links between Trump's campaign and Russia in 2016 and the death of shameful financier Jeffrey Epstein.

Patel has begun restructuring the FBI headquarters

Before serving as director, Patel often said he wanted to put more FBI employees on the scene. Now that he is in charge, he has started to do so.

The bureau has begun to move people to Washington, D.C., and redeploy them across the country. Patel said the goal is to relocate about 1,500 people, which he said would be 10% of the total FBI staff in the DC area.

Some of them were taken to the large FBI campus in Huntsville, Alabama, while others headed to the FBI offices nationwide.

"We need some field agents on the scene. We need some intelligence analysts on the scene," Patel told Congress last month. "We need their expertise in your state, county, town, because there are threats to this country everywhere, and we can't just come from the quarterbacks in Washington, D.C.."

NPR talked about the story with several current and former FBI officials. The first two senior officials usually support the program. The idea has been thought about for a long time, they said, as the headquarters has become too big and bulky over the past 20 years.

He is transferring agent priorities

Patel has repeatedly referred to violent crime as the FBI's top priority, although former officials say the bureau has been focusing on solving problems for decades.

Instead, the main change appears to be a shift in immigration enforcement, which is not a traditional FBI mission. Current and former officials say most on-site offices are now working on immigration enforcement, while leadership is working on seven days a week.

There are concerns about the potential ripple effect of dumping resources on immigration.

Two former senior FBI officials noted that the bureau had only a large amount of resources and that if agents and analysts were immigrated, they would be evacuated from their regular tasks such as counterintelligence or counterterrorism.

The former official spoke on anonymity because they were worried about revenge.

The agency has not commented on the decision of a specific person, said the FBI spokesman Ben Williamson. But he added that the bureau’s “agents and support staff are professionals working around the clock to defend their territory and crush violent crimes – a mission that certainly overlaps with the consequences of the previous administration’s open border policy for four years.”

“We are proud to work with our inter-agency partners to ensure the safety of the American people,” he said.

Disband the Public Corruption Team

The FBI is throwing resources at immigration enforcement, and current and former officials say the new leadership has shifted its focus to investigating white-collar crimes.

They said the bureau dissolved the Prime Minister's public corruption team, which investigated public officials and was eliminated from the Washington Field Office. The team was involved in the investigation into Trump.

One of a former senior FBI officials called the decision “confusing”, adding that the FBI is the only federal agency investigating public corruption, so if you don’t – then no one will.

Another former senior FBI official said the message of these moves is clear: Public corruption is not a worthwhile investment in agent time.

This also follows the Justice Department’s destruction of the public integrity department, which prosecutes corruption, including criminal conflicts and people who make money from government positions.

Meanwhile, Bongino said the bureau will conduct three specific investigations into what he calls “potential public corruption cases” – a pipe bomb found near the Capitol on January 6, 2021; a small bag of cocaine found in the White House in 2023; and a leak from the Supreme Court Dobbs The decision to overturn Roe v Wade.

Bongino has claimed in his podcast in the past that bombs were "inside work" and that the FBI knows who planted them.

None of these cases seems to be directly related to Patel's top priority in weakening violent crimes, but during the Biden administration, although not all of Patel's investigations were conducted.