Remarks as prepared

Good morning, Chairman Moran, Ranking Member Van Hollen, and members of the Subcommittee. I’m honored to be here representing the men and women of the FBI.

President Trump has set new priorities and a new focus for federal law enforcement. The FBI has heard those orders loud and clear, and we are determined to deliver on our crime-fighting and national security mission with renewed vigor.

In just a few short months, we’ve taken bold, sweeping actions like the country has never seen from the FBI. We’ve put away three of our Top Ten Most Wanted Fugitives. We’ve joined ICE in an enhanced, targeted operation in Massachusetts to round up 370 violent and dangerous fugitives.¹ We’ve helped our partners take 20 metric tons [44,000 pounds] of illegal drugs out of circulation off the coast of Florida—and kept half a billion dollars out of the pockets of cartels.² And as part of Operation Allied Corridor, we’ve targeted approximately 3,000 illegal aliens with ties to criminal organizations who are eligible for deportation and removal.

We’re also going after those who harm our children. Just this week, we announced the success of Operation Restore Justice. In five days, we rounded up more than 200 child predators nationwide and put them behind bars.

And even as we’ve doubled down on those criminal threats, we’ve never stopped—and will never stop—going after national security threats, like foreign spies trying to steal our technological innovations, cyber actors looking to infiltrate our networks, and foreign and domestic terrorists plotting attacks against innocent people.

It’s hard to overstate our operational tempo over the past few months—and we’ll keep it up because ours is a no-fail mission.

But every operation we run and plot we disrupt comes with a cost—in particular, manhours. It’s the agents putting bad guys in handcuffs on the streets. The forensic examiners analyzing every sliver of evidence collected at crime scenes. The language analysts translating critical information into English. The IT specialists keeping our networks up and running. And so many others who work every day to protect the American people.

Our costs also include running hundreds of FBI task forces, staffed with about 8,000 federal, state, local, Tribal, and territorial partners.

Take our Joint Terrorism Task Forces, which have been setting the standard for partnerships for 45 years. Each of our 55 field offices runs at least one JTTF, and they showcase the power of law enforcement cooperation at all levels. JTTFs have helped us stop plots like the ones targeting energy facilities in Baltimore in 2022 and 2023—and uncover the facts behind horrific mass casualty incidents, like the New Year’s Day truck attack in New Orleans—among countless others.

Or consider our innovative Counter-Cartel Coordination Center, or C4, a new initiative that combines our criminal and counterterrorism resources to eliminate the cartels designated as foreign terrorist organizations.

These important efforts take resources. There are also costs associated with becoming the best agency we can be for the American people.

Under my leadership, we’ve put our internal processes under the microscope and changed how we operate to better serve our citizens. In one of my first actions as Director, I gave our special agents and intelligence analysts assigned to the National Capital Region the chance to take up posts in the field. Many people jumped on the opportunity. We are moving more than 1,000 positions out of Washington, D.C., and into cities across America, where they’ll work with our state, local, tribal, and territorial partners to make our neighborhoods safer.

We are also realigning our organizational structure to streamline operations. Both efforts focus our resources where they’re needed the most, ensuring that the Bureau is a good steward of taxpayer dollars. We’re making real progress cutting contracts, closing expensive leases, and turning off expensive and redundant IT systems.

I’ve also prioritized building a culture of rigorous compliance and accountability at every level and in all programs. That means modernizing outdated information technology to minimize compliance problems, developing and maintaining robust internal data analytics to uncover noncompliance, and hiring dedicated, expert personnel to address incidents quickly.

Building that infrastructure is how we become an agency the American people can trust and take pride in—an agency that makes the most of our resources and corrects course where necessary.

The members of this committee are important partners in our fight against every threat out there—and in our efforts to build trust and credibility. And you know better than anyone that our no-fail mission requires continued investment.

Without the funds to get ahead of our adversaries, we risk making tradeoffs that will jeopardize the safety of all Americans.

I look forward to demonstrating today how we’re going take the funds that you make available to us—and put them to work for the American people.

Thank you.

¹ https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/ice-law-enforcement-partners-arrest-370-alien-offenders-during-enhanced-operation
² https://www.news.uscg.mil/Press-Releases/Article/4150439/coast-guard-offloads-nearly-510-million-in-illegal-narcotics-interdicted-in-eas/