FBI counterintelligence squads face deep cuts as espionage threats grow

FBI has lost more than 1,500 special agents since January 2025

The five people familiar with the matter, who all spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the topic and fear of retribution, described a bureau that has quietly shifted personnel away from one of its core national-security missions. The cuts are not the result of a specific directive from Director Kash Patel to reduce counterintelligence work or close dedicated squads, the people said. Instead, they reflect the current leadership’s decision to prioritize combatting violent crime, gangs, and illegal immigration — top campaign issues for President Trump — with counterintelligence dropping down the priority ladder.

In many of the FBI’s 56 field offices, counterintelligence squads are operating with 50% to 60% of authorized positions filled, the people said. In multiple offices, the number of squads dedicated to counterespionage work has been cut in half. Field offices have pulled agents and analysts from counterintelligence and assigned them to the administration’s priority issues, and special agents in charge of field offices are not backfilling those spots, instead placing new hires on violent crime or immigration work.

“It’s terrifying, honestly,” one of the people said. “Threats are growing and we’re facing it with less and less. Not a recipe for success.”

An FBI spokesperson disputed the characterization. “This is false — the FBI maintains a robust counterintelligence operation across the enterprise,” the spokesperson said, adding that the bureau has expanded its counterintelligence task forces to more than 1,500 personnel, including from partner agencies and state and local law enforcement. “Anonymous sources who criticize our counterintelligence capabilities are disconnected from reality,” the spokesperson said. The bureau also pointed to security at recent major events, including America’s 250th anniversary celebrations and the FIFA World Cup, as evidence of its capabilities.

In recent congressional testimony, Patel said the FBI under his leadership has arrested more spies from Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea “than any FBI in history.” NPR was not able to independently verify that assertion. While arrest numbers are one measure, they are not the most important metric of success in counterintelligence work, according to Emily Harding, a former CIA analyst and former deputy director of the Senate Intelligence Committee under Republicans who is now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“I want to know things like how many people were kicked out of the country because of an investigation, or how many networks were completely exposed and halted,” Harding said. “Sometimes the win is not the prosecution and the arrest. Sometimes the win is being able to trace a network all the way back to its source, and then being able to wrap up that network and perhaps trade them for something you want even more.”

The manpower shortages are also a ripple effect of Patel’s push to relocate analysts from FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., to field offices — an effort that some former bureau officials said has merit but has had unintended consequences. Analysts who focused on counterintelligence were moved from headquarters and, in many cases, shifted off counterespionage work and onto violent crime and gang cases. The loss of those analysts has made it harder to start new investigations, the people familiar with the matter said, and even when agents can open a case, a lack of analysts has made it harder to make sense of evidence and provide direction for investigators.

The cuts are also the product of a significant exodus of experienced FBI agents and analysts over the past 18 months. The bureau has lost more than 1,500 special agents since Trump returned to office, according to two people familiar with the matter, and is down more than 650 agents from January 2025 levels. Some departures were involuntary. In the days before the Trump administration launched its war on Iran, five special agents and a supervisor who worked on Iranian counterintelligence threats were dismissed. Several other special agents who worked on counterintelligence, including in New York, were fired for having been involved in investigations of President Trump.

“When you lose that knowledge, you don’t just replace it with a brand new agent. You lose the experience and are starting from scratch,” one person said. “There’s a huge learning curve for this work.”

The FBI’s Counterintelligence and Espionage Division runs from monitoring foreign spies working out of embassies and consulates to investigating “non-traditional collectors” — university researchers, academics, and private-sector workers — attempting to steal U.S. technology and intellectual property. The division also investigates U.S. officials who may be selling secrets to a foreign power, including a State Department employee accused of providing classified information to China, and works to prevent foreign governments from intimidating or assassinating Americans or dissidents on U.S. soil.

Counterintelligence cases are slow, painstaking work that often involves long periods watching a target, Harding said. “Counterintelligence cases frequently go on for years and years, and they result not so much in an arrest, but maybe in somebody getting kicked out of the country or something very quiet happening,” she said. “If you have somebody who you think is a potential Russian spy, you need 24/7 coverage of that person, and that’s a lot of manpower to do 24/7 coverage.”

“If the counterintelligence agents don’t manage to shut down the networks, you lose everything from intellectual property to economic standings in the world, so even something as bad as real government secrets that are highly classified,” Harding said.

The FBI remains active in counterintelligence cases under the current administration. In May 2025, the bureau arrested a former Defense Intelligence Agency computer specialist for trying to provide classified information to a foreign power; he pleaded guilty in August. Last month, federal prosecutors brought charges against five suspected Russian intelligence operatives for allegedly planning attacks in Europe and the United States, including a purported assassination plot in Washington, D.C.

But former officials cautioned that counterintelligence threats are silent by nature, which makes it hard to know when one is going undetected. Former FBI Director Christopher Wray, who made combatting the threat from China a priority of his tenure and stepped down in December 2024, said in a 2022 speech that the bureau had more than 2,000 investigations focused on Chinese efforts to steal U.S. information or technology. “There’s just no country that presents a broader threat to our ideas, innovation, and economic security than China,” Wray said. He added that the FBI was opening a new China-related case roughly every 12 hours. “The harm from the Chinese government’s economic espionage isn’t just that its companies pull ahead based on illegally gotten technology. While they pull ahead, they push our companies and workers behind,” Wray said. “That harm — company failures, job losses — has been building for a decade to the crush we feel today.”