FBI rules are forcing out managers

Washington Times:

An order by FBI executives requiring senior supervisors to move to the bureau's Washington headquarters after five years in the field or step down has led to a critical shortage of qualified managers in key investigative posts, including those who supervise an FBI division that tracks down al Qaeda terrorists, say veteran FBI supervisors and rank-and-file agents.

The four-year-old order, known to the agents as "five years up or out," has been met with widespread criticism. Field supervisors and agents say the order has reduced the FBI's ability to target, arrest and prosecute criminals, including terrorists.

More than a dozen field supervisors and street agents interviewed by The Washington Times said the order has damaged the FBI's effectiveness by assigning Washington desk jobs to supervisory agents who should be managing critical long-term investigations and have years of experience.

"The fact that everything has to be decided at headquarters has caused a major problem," said one senior agent. "I can tell you, many experienced supervisors are bailing out, taking their retirements or leaving early rather than uprooting their lives to move to Washington where very little actual investigative work is being done."

Another longtime agent said the order "makes no sense at all" and that the "considerable expertise" that field supervisors bring to investigations is "critical in making cases that can hold up in court." The agent said the refusal of many to leave the field to assume management jobs in Washington has left the bureau with a shortage of experienced leadership and outright vacancies in several key areas.

One critical area where leadership vacancies have created a problem is the FBI's International Terrorism Operations Section (ITOS I), which is responsible for monitoring al Qaeda terrorist activity in this country and abroad. An FBI memo March 5 said only 62 percent of the funded supervisory positions within ITOS I were staffed.

"Executive management is canvassing the division for volunteers to be permanently assigned to ITOS 1. This is due to the fact that ITOS 1 is currently at 62% of its funded staffing level," the memo said. "It is critical to the [counterterrorism] mission that these positions be filled as soon as possible."

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"It's crazy to have investigations run out of Washington," said a veteran agent. "If they decentralized the process, they'd have no trouble getting people to run these cases. You need to have face-to-face meetings with the case agents and the informants, and you need to make decisions right now.

"You just can't make those kind of decisions from Washington," the agent said.

The order requiring supervisory agents to go to Washington was issued in June 2004 by FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III to fill what he called a critical shortage of vacancies at FBI headquarters and to broaden the expertise of managers within the bureau as it reorganized in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.

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The FBI Agents Association, which represents about 80 percent of the bureau's 12,000 agents, conducted a survey of nearly 1,000 supervisors assigned at 56 field offices affected by the order and found that more than 50 percent of them intended to leave management or retire as a result of the order.

This report suggest that the rule is not working as intended. Mueller needs to do a better job of defending the rule or change it.