FBI Director Kash Patel told members of the House Appropriations Committee on Wednesday that the White House’s proposed funding for the FBI in fiscal year (FY) 2026 falls short of the agency’s requirements, especially as the FBI looks to leverage AI capabilities to help neutralize cyber threats.
During a hearing focused on the FY2026 budget request for the FBI, Patel told lawmakers that the FBI’s “no-fail mission continues and can’t continue without your investment and your support.”
President Donald Trump sent a proposed budget to Congress last week that features a $545 million cut to the FBI’s budget for FY2026. At Wednesday’s hearing, however, Patel said the FBI needs about $1 billion more than that for next year – or a total closer to $11.1 billion – to achieve its mission and avoid workforce cuts.
“The skinny budget is a proposal, and I’m working through the appropriations process to explain why we need more than what has been proposed,” Patel said.
“Our enemies are getting more and more creative by the day, and we need to keep up,” he said, adding, “We risk making trade-offs that will jeopardize the safety of Americans.”
Both Patel and lawmakers on the committee cited the growing sophistication of cyberattacks. Rep. Hal Rogers, R-Ky., chairman of the Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Subcommittee, said the FBI must be smarter and faster than its adversaries.
“The constant advancements in technology and artificial intelligence are a double-edged sword, providing new opportunities for economic development in our communities, but also creating new risks for our hospitals, our banks, our educational institutions, and even putting our children in harm’s way when it comes to cybercrimes,” Rep. Rogers said.
When asked by Rep. John Carter, R-Texas, how the FBI is coordinating with the private sector and local law enforcement to detect and neutralize cyber threats before they impact the electric grid and related supply chains, Patel said, “That’s one of the pillars of what we are trying to do at the bureau.”
“We can’t do it from Washington, D.C. We do it by engaging our state and local law enforcement partners,” Patel said. “What we can do is bring in our AI-driven capabilities to go in and synthesize the mountains of information that are coming in, because there is no human or set of humans that can go through the amount of intelligence and information that we receive. It’s a problem that we have, and the public has acknowledged.”
“The challenge and the rub is, where do we allow computers to come in and humans to stop?” he said. “We’re working through that at the bureau right now to say we should be able to use certain elements of AI to triage that capability, discard the unuseful information, and highlight to leadership what the useful information is.”
Patel said that the FBI wants to share the useful information with Congress, FBI agents, and assistant U.S. attorneys in the field so that they can bring appropriate cases.
“We can only do that if we embed ourselves with state and local law enforcement, and that’s been a big priority of mine,” he concluded.