The Trumpification of the FBI

Don Moynihan

A 2020 paper published in the American Journal of Political Science studied who works for secret police organizations under authoritarian governments. The authors, Christian Gläßel and Adam Scharpf, argued that those willing to do the dirty work for non-democratic regimes were not typically sadists or psychopaths, but simply responding to careerists incentives. Using personnel data from the Argentinian secret service, they found that their recruits had underperformed early in their career. They were typically mediocre men, for whom the dark demands of abusing citizens offered an opportunity to lift themselves to a better career.

We are at a moment when a study on the motivations of authoritarian secret police have become painfully relevant, illuminating what is happening to large chunks of the American government.

Organizations like ICE or CBP are being dramatically expanded, but find that they must offer large bonuses and lower recruiting standards to find enough employees who won’t have a problem turning guns on their fellow citizens.

Organizations with high professional standards have the furthest to fall. Lets focus on the FBI. As James Q. Wilson details in Bureaucracy, the founding father of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, built an organizational culture around the ethos of professionalism.1 Agents wore suits, not uniforms. For decades they avoided undercover work that might sully their reputation and appearance. They put a premium on recruiting well-educated agents. If it is a cliche of police procedurals that FBI agents clash with state and local police, it reflects an underlying reality that the agency thinks of itself as being better.

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