The FBI told the staff who run its background checks, in an internal memo dated 16 June, that paying for sex, stealing from an employer and bestiality no longer automatically disqualify a job applicant.
Applicants who paid for sex stay eligible if they did so fewer than three times and the conduct happened more than 10 years ago. Theft from an employer is survivable if it happened more than three years ago. Bestiality and animal cruelty are survivable if the conduct happened before the applicant turned 18. An applicant who bought sex twice, 11 years ago, and who worked outside public safety, education, health, social work, finance and law at the time, now reaches case-by-case review instead of an automatic rejection.
The memo travelled to vetting staff as the internal document type the bureau calls an electronic communication. It has not been published. Its terms were described separately to two news organisations by people briefed on it, in accounts that appeared on 28 August and agree on every numeric condition.
The FBI denied that it has dropped its standards. "It is false to suggest criminal behavior like this is no longer disqualifying at the FBI," the bureau said in a statement, and said it maintains some of the highest suitability standards in the U.S. government. An FBI spokesperson said the changes separate applicants who committed crimes from applicants who warrant further evaluation in rare exigent circumstances.
The occupation test
Applicants who solicited sex while working in public safety, education, health, social work, finance or law remain automatically disqualified. The applicant's own occupation decides the case. What was bought, and from whom, does not enter the test.
Military service is absent from those six categories, and whether service members count as holding a position of trust is unresolved in the reported terms. The FBI gave service members who bought sex in places where it is legal as one reason for the change.
Applicants are asked at interview whether they have engaged in what the vetting process calls sexually deviant behaviour. An applicant who acknowledges paying for sex is then asked when it happened and how many times. Meeting the criteria produces eligibility, not an offer.
No reported condition asks the age of the person sold, whether that person had been coerced, or what the applicant believed at the time. The count and the clock decide eligibility by themselves.
What the bureau still publishes
The FBI's special agent frequently-asked-questions document, filed on fbijobs.gov under a March 2023 path and still live there, lists 11 automatic disqualifiers. The ninth reads "Engagement in prostitution or bestiality". The second covers conviction of a felony and, for special agent candidates, conviction of a domestic violence misdemeanour or worse. The fourth is drug use while holding a clearance.
The bureau's general employment eligibility guide of May 2022 lists 10 disqualifiers and carries no prostitution or bestiality item at all, which places the wording that the June memo overrides in the special agent stream specifically rather than in the bureau-wide screen.
The eligibility page currently live on fbijobs.gov lists nine conditions: citizenship, a public record in good standing with no felony convictions, adherence to the FBI drug policy, passing urinalysis and the background investigation, student loans in good standing, filed federal, state and local tax returns, current court-ordered child support, no engagement with organisations designed to overthrow the U.S. government and Selective Service registration. Neither prostitution, bestiality nor domestic violence survives on that page.
Not one of the three documents, in any version, contains a single item on the rape or sexual abuse of children. What the live public list screens for is a felony conviction, a test that catches only applicants a prosecutor has already convicted. The FBI said that any applicant who committed criminal sexual acts of the kind referenced would not be eligible. The internal standards governing admissions made during the polygraph, which is where such an admission would surface, have not been published.
Department policy since 2015
Attorney General Eric Holder circulated a memorandum on 10 April 2015 to all department personnel, headed "Prohibition on the Solicitation of Prostitution". It prohibits soliciting, procuring or accepting commercial sex at all times, regardless of the jurisdiction or the legal status of the conduct there, and extends the standard to contractors, grantees and cooperative agreement holders. Violations draw suspension or termination. Supervisors who fail to report suspected violations face discipline of their own.
Soliciting prostitution "threatens the core mission of the Department", the memo said, "not simply because it invites extortion, blackmail, and leaks of sensitive or classified information, but also because it undermines the Department's efforts to eradicate the scourge of human trafficking". A department spokesperson confirmed that the memo remains in effect.
Senator Chuck Grassley had written to Inspector General Michael Horowitz on 26 March 2015, two weeks before the memo issued, demanding the investigative report on two FBI agents in the Philippines. One had used an FBI-issued BlackBerry to hire a stripper, and the OIG found insufficient evidence of solicitation but substantiated a lack of candour in sworn court testimony. Grassley called the Holder memo a good first step on 13 April 2015 and said it "fails to impose a sufficiently serious policy that would deter employees from engaging in this practice".
Job applicants are not named in the memo, which binds employees, contractors and subcontractors. Every applicant the new standard admits becomes a person the memo binds on the day they are hired.
The bureau's own case files
The Justice Department inspector general found, in report 22-012 dated 14 December 2021, that six FBI officials had committed misconduct, five of them for soliciting, procuring and accepting commercial sex while on FBI assignment overseas. Four lacked candour in compelled interviews and polygraph examinations. One made false statements in a compelled interview denying sex acts with a prostitute, in violation of federal law. Five failed to report their contacts with the foreign nationals who provided the commercial sex. Two of the five resigned, two retired and one was removed, all while the investigation was still running. The sixth official's misconduct was failing to report suspected violations of the Holder memo by the others.
A fuller version of report 22-012 reached the public years later through records requests and identified Cambodia, the Philippines and Thailand among the countries involved.
The inspector general substantiated, in report 25-066 posted on 1 July 2025, that a supervisory special agent had solicited and used prostitutes on numerous occasions while on FBI assignment overseas and travelling domestically, had misused an FBI-issued mobile device to conduct the transactions, and had failed to report continuing contacts with foreign nationals including those he paid for sex. Criminal prosecution was declined.
A retired agent who specialised in polygraph examinations said that "I don't think anybody who has been involved with prostitution is trustworthy", because the conduct can be held over an agent's head. Daniel Meyer, a security clearance specialist at Tully Rinckey, said that an admission of this kind had historically been a death knell for applicants at the FBI, the CIA and the NSA.
Daniel Brunner, who served 20 years as an FBI agent, said: "If they're moving the bar for sexual encounters to include prostitution, what is that saying about the applicant pool? They're trying to bring in more people, which to me indicates that the applicant pool is extremely shallow right now."
Chris Piehota, a retired FBI senior executive, said he was comfortable with leniency for youthful conduct. "I don't think you get a better or worse candidate from something you did in your college years," he said.
Mark Zaid, a lawyer who represents FBI agents, said: "How can this not be reflective of a recruiting problem at the FBI?"
Current and former FBI employees said the change could reach the credibility of agents who investigate human trafficking, because those agents testify in court and a defence lawyer can ask what they have paid for.
Animal cruelty and the age line
The FBI began collecting animal cruelty as a Group A offence in the National Incident-Based Reporting System on 1 January 2016. Nelson Ferry of the bureau's Criminal Statistics Management Unit said at the time that "some studies say that cruelty to animals is a precursor to larger crime".
Coercion is not among the new standards' conditions on bestiality, which ask only how old the applicant was. An applicant abused as a child in acts involving an animal and an applicant who abused an animal by choice reach the same result. An FBI spokesperson defended the change as flexibility for rare cases, including applicants who were sexually abused as children in acts involving animals.
Katherine Schweit, a former supervisory special agent whose assignments included supervising human resources, said that survivors already have a route to raise it, because the polygraph process includes a private conversation with the examiner to "explore and explain and discuss anything in their background".
James Davidson, president of the FBI Integrity Project and a former FBI agent, said that bestiality is "clearly a potential indication of a more serious emotional issue".
The bureau's own crime statistics classify the conduct the memo calls bestiality as animal sexual abuse, one of four categories of animal cruelty counted in the National Incident-Based Reporting System, alongside simple and gross neglect, intentional abuse and torture, and organised abuse such as dogfighting. The system defines animal cruelty as "intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly taking an action that mistreats or kills any animal without just cause". An animal cannot consent, which is why the bureau counts the act as abuse of the animal rather than as sexual conduct.
What the law counts
A child cannot consent, and the FBI has counted it that way since 1 January 2013, when the Uniform Crime Reporting programme adopted a definition of rape that covers penetration "without the consent of the victim" and states that the victim may be "incapable of giving consent because of his/her age". Federal law reaches the same place by a different route: prosecutors do not have to prove force, threats of force, fraud or coercion where the person paid for is a minor, according to the Justice Department's guidance on 18 U.S.C. 1591. The Trafficking Victims Protection Act, at 22 U.S.C. 7102, defines a "commercial sex act" as a severe form of trafficking if it is induced by force, fraud or coercion or if the person is under 18. Where either condition holds, the act the statute calls commercial sex is rape, and the payment buys the rape of a child or of a coerced adult rather than anyone's agreement.
Section 1591 splits the conduct in two. One clause covers whoever recruits, entices, harbours, transports, provides, obtains, advertises or maintains the person. The other, which Congress wrote into the statute in 2015, covers whoever "patronizes, or solicits" them. Where a third party holds the person, the money reaches that party and the buyer receives access to someone that party controls.
Paying to rape a child aged 14 to 17 carries a mandatory minimum of 10 years in federal prison, rising to 15 years where the child is under 14 or where force, fraud or coercion was used. Subsection (c) relieves prosecutors of proving the buyer knew the person's age where the buyer had a reasonable opportunity to observe them. Congress filed these acts against children in the criminal code's sexual abuse chapter, chapter 109A, which is where 18 U.S.C. 2423 points when it defines illicit sexual conduct.
A U.S. citizen or permanent resident who pays to rape a child abroad faces up to 30 years under 18 U.S.C. 2423(c), whatever the law of the country they are in. Local legality, the circumstance the FBI gave to justify the change, is no defence where the person sold is a child.
Directive (EU) 2024/1712, adopted on 13 June 2024, requires every member state to criminalise the knowing use of services of a trafficking victim, in terms the European Commission ties to reducing the demand that drives trafficking. The deadline for member states to write it into national law passed in July 2026.
Paying for sex is illegal in every U.S. state apart from a handful of Nevada counties, and legal or decriminalised in dozens of countries.
Coercion and buyer knowledge
The ILO, the UN labour agency, estimated that 6.3 million people were in forced commercial sexual exploitation on any given day in 2021, 23 per cent of everyone in forced labour worldwide. Almost four in five were women or girls. More than half of the 3.3 million children in forced labour were being sexually exploited for money, about 1.7 million children. The estimates were published on 12 September 2022.
No national statistics agency publishes a count of the total number of people selling sex, so the share of purchases that involve a trafficked or coerced person cannot be computed from the ILO figure, and no prevalence study establishing that share was found for this piece.
Of 101 sex buyers surveyed by Melissa Farley and colleagues, 66 per cent said "a majority of women are lured, tricked, or trafficked" into the trade and 41 per cent said they had used a woman controlled by a pimp, in findings published in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence in 2017. The same study found buyers scored higher than matched non-buyers on measures of sexual aggression and hostile masculinity.
An earlier survey of 103 men who bought sex in London, published by Eaves and Prostitution Research and Education in December 2009, found 55 per cent believed a majority of the women had been lured, tricked or trafficked, 36 per cent thought a woman they had bought had been trafficked into the city, 50 per cent said they had used a woman under the control of a pimp and 19 per cent believed there were girls under 18 in the venues they used.
Germany's Prostitutionsgesetz took effect on 1 January 2002, ending the classification of the trade as immoral in German law and opening contracts and social insurance to the people selling. The Federal Criminal Police Office recorded 364 completed investigations into sexual exploitation during 2024, a 10-year high, with 465 identified victims, 110 of them German nationals, in a report published on 29 August 2025. A further 195 proceedings concerned the commercial sexual exploitation of minors.
Seo-Young Cho, Axel Dreher and Eric Neumayer found in World Development in 2013 that countries that had legalised the trade report higher trafficking inflows, the expansion of the market outweighing any shift of demand from illegal to legal supply. Barbara Kavemann and Elfriede Steffan wrote in 2013 that recorded German trafficking victims fell from 987 in 2001 to 482 in 2011, and attributed the rise in the number of migrants selling sex to EU enlargement rather than to the 2002 law. Both readings rest on official counts of detected cases, which move with enforcement effort.
Departures and recruitment
Philip Fields, a former FBI intelligence analyst, published an analysis of federal personnel data on 7 April 2026 finding that 1,139 special agents left the bureau during 2025, at an average tenure of 21.8 years. The departures included 407 leaders, 65 of them in the Senior Executive Service. The Justice Department puts the bureau's agent strength at around 13,700.
The Justice Department has lost close to 1,000 assistant U.S. attorneys over the same period, and a National Security Division section that handles espionage cases has lost 40 per cent of its prosecutors, according to reporting published on 19 April 2026. Many of the FBI's 56 field offices are now run by agents with less than a year in the job.
FBI Director Kash Patel said in an interview with former agent John Nantz posted on 27 July that the bureau is "losing too many qualified candidates to the rigors of the requirements from yesteryear". Patel said in the same interview that application numbers were the highest in the bureau's history, that the FBI was making its requirements harder rather than easier, and that candidates with one year of police experience would now be considered, down from two. Patel has separately put the rise in applications at 112 per cent and has set a target of roughly 700 new special agents for this year.
Transfers from other federal agencies now complete the Quantico course in nine weeks rather than the four months and more it previously ran. The fbijobs.gov special agent page still advertises an 18-week immersion and 850 hours of instruction in the Basic Field Training Course.
Panel interviews and written assessments were dropped for current bureau employees applying to become special agents, in a change reported on 19 February 2026. FBI spokesperson Ben Williamson said the bureau was "streamlining the process to remove duplicative, bureaucratic steps".
Patel waived polygraph screening for deputy director Dan Bongino, congressional affairs official Marshall Yates and his personal assistant Nicole Rucker, in waivers reported on 14 November 2025. The bureau denied that any of the three had failed a polygraph examination.
