Senators, FBI Director Patel clash over cyber division personnel, arrests
FBI cyber division cuts under President Donald Trump will reduce personnel there by half, a top Democratic senator warned Tuesday, while FBI Director Kash Patel countered that arrests and convictions have risen under the Trump administration.
A contentious Senate Judiciary Committee hearing dominated by clashes over political violence, Patel’s leadership and accusations about the politicization of the bureau nonetheless saw senators probing the FBI’s performance on cybersecurity.
“My office received information that cuts to the bureau’s cyber division will cut personnel by half despite the ever-increasing threat posed by adverse foreign actors,” said Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, the top Democrat on the panel. The Trump administration has proposed a $500 million cut for the FBI in fiscal 2026.
Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., said that as the FBI has shifted personnel toward immigration and politically motivated investigations like the Tesla task force, it has undercut other missions. “It has an impact on other priorities, like nation-state threats and ransomware investigations,” he said.
Padilla was one of several Senate Democrats, like Cory Booker of New Jersey and Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, who said the FBI’s cyber mission was suffering because its personnel were being directed elsewhere.
Patel told Hirono that the FBI’s cyber branch was one of the bureau’s “most impressive” units, and that it had made 409 arrests, a 42% increase compared to the same period last year, and garnered 169 convictions.
As Padilla questioned him about the FBI’s mission to protect against election interference and the Justice Department ending the Foreign Influence Task Force, Patel answered that the FBI did not “in any way divert or reallocate resources from that critical mission set.” He said it was still working on it through its cyber programs, which had seen a “40, 50, 60%” increase in arrests in cyber threat cases involving critical infrastructure and interference with elections.
Patel said he hadn’t shifted any resources away from any critical missions like terrorism toward things like Tesla vandalism or sending federal personnel to cities like Washington, D.C. “They never left their primary job,” he said. “It is a surge in law enforcement.”
Hirono asked Patel to say who had replaced top officials who had exited the cyber division, but he said only that they were “supremely qualified individuals” and wouldn’t give their names “so you can attack them.” Hirono replied, “you don’t know” when he wouldn’t say who they were.
More broadly, Patel said the FBI was taking the fight to Chinese threat groups like Salt Typhoon and Volt Typhoon, and going after ransomware and malware attackers.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., said she was concerned about a rise in artificial intelligence-generated election interference, including materials directed at her. Patel said the FBI was looking into it, but that the culprits appeared to be “loose groups overseas, without any central cluster.”
