FBI Candidates No Longer Barred From Hiring Pool as Agency Allegedly Lowers Standards

The FBI quietly relaxed several of its hiring disqualifications in June, according to an internal memo obtained by CBS News. The resulting document reads less like a policy revision than an inventory of how badly the bureau needs applicants.

What changed

Candidates who paid for sex may now be considered, provided it happened fewer than three times and not within the past decade. Applicants who stole from an employer can be considered if the theft occurred at least three years ago. And candidates with a history of bestiality or animal cruelty are no longer automatically excluded, so long as the conduct occurred before they turned 18, with polygraph testing required.

Some exclusions survive intact. Anyone who held what the bureau calls a position of trust — education, health care, finance, law, public safety, social work — remains automatically disqualified over prostitution-related history.

The distinction the bureau chose to draw

That last carve-out is worth examining, because it reveals the logic. The FBI is not making a judgment about the conduct. It is making a judgment about the applicant's job at the time of the conduct — the same act disqualifies a former teacher and does not disqualify someone who was working somewhere else.

There is a defensible theory buried in there about abuse of professional position, and there is also a much simpler explanation, which is that the categories were drawn where they could be drawn without shrinking the pool any further.

The clause with no distinction in it

The animal cruelty change is drawing the sharpest criticism, and not only for the obvious reasons. As written, the standard makes no distinction between coerced acts and voluntary ones.

That means a person who was abused as a child and a person who committed the abuse are being processed by the same clause, evaluated by the same polygraph, and asked the same questions by the same examiner. Whatever the drafters intended, a rule that cannot tell those two people apart is not a screening standard. It is a box that gets ticked.

Why standards move

The national security attorney Mark Zaid has offered the plainest explanation available: the FBI is struggling to recruit and retain people under this administration, and hiring standards are what gives when the applicant pool contracts. Agents have left, the bureau's leadership has been publicly politicized, and the job now carries reputational risks it did not carry five years ago.

That is a coherent account, and it produces an uncomfortable corollary. Every disqualification an institution maintains is a statement about its values right up until the moment maintaining it becomes expensive. What survives the contraction is what the institution actually believed; what gets relaxed was, evidently, something it could afford.

The bureau has now published a fairly precise map of which of its standards were which.