By Jana Winter
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -FBI investigations have been slowed or stalled by the second-longest U.S. government shutdown in history, leaving the bureau without funds to pay informants or make undercover drug or gun buys, gaps that an FBI spokesperson said are putting national security at risk.
The FBI does not provide detailed public information about how its $10.7 billion budget is spent and it is not clear how much of the total has been held up due to the shutdown, according to five current and three former FBI employees.
The shutdown, now in its 30th day, has frozen FBI funds used for operational travel, such as when an informant needs to travel to meet a drug supplier or boss or another investigative subject, the sources said. FBI employees are also without funds to travel outside their local areas.
“In a shutdown, the FBI’s eyes and ears go dark,” said retired FBI agent Tom Simon, who worked counterterrorism and criminal cases and at one point worked on a squad recruiting and paying informants. “Without funds to pay informants, the Bureau loses its most critical source of real-time intelligence,” said Simon, who retired in 2021 after 26 years at the FBI and now works as a private investigator in Florida.
In response to a Reuters inquiry about the shutdown’s effects on investigations, the FBI acknowledged its operations had been affected.
“President Trump has repeatedly called for the federal government to reopen and the FBI fully concurs with that position,” an FBI spokesperson told Reuters. “As Director (Kash) Patel has previously stated, this shutdown puts the FBI in an extremely difficult position of reallocating already limited resources across numerous critical law enforcement efforts … there is no doubt that those choosing to play politics with government funding are putting national security at risk.”
The shutdown has furloughed hundreds of thousands of workers, has interfered with the collection and distribution of economic data and has threatened to cut off food and education aid programs. President Donald Trump’s administration has worked to find ways to continue to pay some law enforcement agents and active-duty military, but the FBI employees said that the bureau’s operations are still not fully funded.
Democrats, the minority in Congress, have withheld their votes from funding bills in an effort to extend subsidies to the health insurance of some 24 million Americans.
“The government shutdown is affecting a lot of investigations, national security, criminal investigations, white collar, etc.,” said former agent Dan Brunner, who worked on cases involving the MS-13 gang.
Managing informants who haven’t been paid requires “some massaging by experienced agents” to keep the case going, Brunner said, adding that this could prove challenging since many experienced agents have left the bureau over the last six months.
Last week, the FBI paid its special agents — a small fraction of its workforce — but it is unclear if they or anyone else at the bureau will be paid again during the shutdown.
“It is a problem that the agents are getting paid and everyone else is not,” Brunner said. “If this goes to a second or third paycheck there’s going to be some serious fissures and you can’t have that.”
(Reporting by Jana Winter, additional reporting by Andy Sullivan; editing by Scott Malone and Diane Craft)
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