CBS News reported in late August 2026 that the FBI has loosened the conduct standards that automatically end a job application, communicated to background-check personnel in an internal electronic communication dated June 16.
The specific thresholds, as reported: paying for sex no longer disqualifies automatically if it happened more than ten years ago and fewer than three times. Stealing from an employer no longer disqualifies automatically once three years have passed. Bestiality or animal cruelty may be excused if the conduct occurred before the applicant turned 18. One carve-out survived: applicants who solicited sex while holding a position of trust, a category covering public safety, education, health, social work, finance and law, remain automatically disqualified.
The FBI disputes the framing, and its response belongs at the top rather than the bottom. “It is false to suggest criminal behavior like this is no longer disqualifying at the FBI,” the bureau said in a statement reported by the Associated Press. “Any applicant who has engaged in criminal sexual acts like those referenced would of course not be eligible for employment, and it is ridiculous to suggest otherwise.” The bureau tied the change to service members and others who may have paid for sex where it was legal. A 2015 memo from then-Attorney General Eric Holder barring the solicitation of prostitution remains in force. The distinction the FBI is drawing is between conduct that is an automatic bar and conduct assessed case by case; the reporting describes the former changing, not the latter disappearing.
The context is a staffing crisis the administration created. Former FBI analyst Philip Fields counted 1,139 special agents gone in 2025, against a workforce of roughly 13,700 agents, after a term of firings, forced resignations and retirements documented elsewhere in this tracker. Director Kash Patel has argued the old requirements screen out too many people: “We are losing too many qualified candidates to the rigors of the requirements from yesteryear.” Reuters reported in February that Patel planned to drop a panel interview and a writing test for staff seeking agent roles, so this is the second documented easing of standards under him.
Daniel Brunner, a retired agent of two decades, put the inference plainly to the AP: “If they're moving the bar for sexual encounters to include prostitution, what is that saying about the applicant pool.” The documented sequence is an agency that lost roughly eight percent of its agents in a year and then lowered the bar for who may replace them (see Patel Fires About a Dozen FBI Staff From the Trump Documents Case After Revealing That Smith's Team Subpoenaed His Phone Records, Trump Appoints Kash Patel, Whose Book Lists 60 'Enemies' to Target, as FBI Director and Inside the FBI's 'Payback Squad': A Secret Team Building Cases Against Trump's Enemies, With Brennan's Indictment Expected in Weeks).
Update (September 16, 2026): Patel defended the change under oath at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on September 15. He did not dispute that automatic disqualifiers had been removed; he described the purpose differently. “What we did was, we did not want to punish victims of bestiality, victims who were trafficked,” he told Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL). Durbin pointed out that the policy covered “applicants who have been engaged in bestiality, not victims of bestiality.” Patel replied, “Applicants who have engaged in bestiality means they were victims of bestiality because they were forced to do so.” The Guardian and other outlets reported that the change applies to conduct before age 18, and an FBI spokesperson told the Guardian the bureau was “not relaxing hiring standards.”
Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) pressed the point. “Why would you even get into bestiality?” he asked, and later, “So you disqualified the animal?” He suggested Patel should have asked his staff, “What planet did you parachute in from?” Patel said, “That was my initial response, senator. But they then explained to me and showed me cases in which people were forced into it and had applied to the FBI, and so I thought they should be considered.” Pressed by Kennedy, Patel agreed that someone who voluntarily had sex with an animal could not be an FBI agent. No outlet has published the text of the internal guidance, so Patel's description of it as a protection for trafficking victims cannot be checked against the policy itself.