The Federal Bureau of Investigation
Summary
The FBI runs on $10.62 billion in enacted budget authority and about 33,290 funded staff in FY2026 -- roughly $31 per U.S. resident -- while its Internet Crime Complaint Center logged over 1 million fraud complaints in 2025 and its Recovery Asset Team froze $679 million of $1.16 billion in attempted theft.
What is this organization?
What does it do?
Among its countable outputs: the 's Internet Crime Complaint Center received 1,008,597 complaints in 2025, reporting $20.877 billion in losses to cyber-enabled fraud -- a 26 percent jump in losses from 2024. The Bureau runs that intake alongside 56 field offices, roughly 350 resident agencies, and 63 Legal Attache offices and 37 sub-offices across 84 countries, coordinating investigations from posts abroad back to the domestic complaint line.
What does it cost to run — money and people?
Congress enacted $10,624 million in total budget authority for the 's Salaries and Expenses and Construction accounts in fiscal year 2026, funding 34,442 authorized positions -- 33,290 of them filled full-time-equivalent staff, including 12,902 special agents -- down from 35,092 positions and $10,674 million enacted the year before. Weighed against the Census Bureau's 341.8 million U.S. residents as of July 2025, that funding works out to about $31.08 per person.
View data as table
| Counterterrorism / Counterintelligence | 4,189.5 | 12,125 FTE |
|---|---|---|
| Criminal Enterprises / Federal Crimes | 3,887.1 | 12,881 FTE |
| Intelligence | 1,888.3 | 5,806 FTE |
| Criminal Justice Services | 644.6 | 2,478 FTE |
Why is it good for society?
The mechanism shows in the money: in 2025 the 's Recovery Asset Team opened 3,900 bank-freeze requests against $1.16 billion in attempted fraud losses reported to IC3, and recovered $679 million of it -- a 58 percent success rate that depends on moving faster than wired money can clear between banks. Without that coordination between IC3, field offices, and financial institutions, the counterfactual is the one fraud victims faced for decades: money wired out is money gone, with no domestic mechanism built to chase it across banks in time.
- IC3 alone processed over 1 million fraud complaints in 2025 -- a caseload the size of a mid-sized federal agency's entire docket, run inside one program.
- The 's FY2026 enacted budget authority fell about $49 million and 650 positions from FY2025, even as IC3's reported losses climbed 26 percent the same year.
Your handles.* If you're the victim of a cyber-enabled scam or fraud, file a report at IC3.gov -- the sooner a loss is reported, the better the odds the Recovery Asset Team can freeze it before it clears. To report waste, fraud, or misconduct, the Justice Department's own watchdog runs the DOJ Office of Inspector General hotline. Budget and Director oversight run through Congress -- the Senate Judiciary Committee holds the Director's confirmation and oversight hearings.
Sources(6) ▾
- Office of the Law Revision Counsel, U.S. House of Representatives (U.S. Code), 28 U.S.C. § 531 — Federal Bureau of Investigation (with Historical and Revision Notes) (1966-09-06) — Official U.S. Code text placing the within the Department of Justice, plus the section's historical/revision notes -- the source for this entry's identity clause: 1908 administrative creation, the 1933 Executive Order 6166 consolidation, and the March 22, 1935 renaming act. Wayback save-page-now request returned HTTP 520 (known escalated outage); the url above is the direct official-code page. uscode.house.gov
- Office of the Law Revision Counsel, U.S. House of Representatives (U.S. Code), 28 U.S.C. § 532 — Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (1966-09-06) — Statutory text establishing that the Attorney General appoints the Director and that the Director's term of service is ten years, non-renewable -- the source for this entry's identity-clause line on the Director's term. Wayback save-page-now request returned HTTP 520 (known escalated outage); the url above is the direct official-code page. uscode.house.gov
- U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Legal Counsel, Constitutionality of Legislation Extending the Term of the FBI Director (Office of Legal Counsel memorandum) (2011-06-20) — 's own Office of Legal Counsel opinion, citing the exact statutory lineage of the Director's 10-year term: the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 as amended by the Crime Control Act of 1976 (codified at 28 U.S.C. § 532 note) -- corroborates the term-of-service fact independently of the bare Cornell LII text. justice.gov · original document
- U.S. Department of Justice, Justice Management Division, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) FY 2027 Budget Request at a Glance (2026-03-01) — The 's own budget-request summary to Congress, including the detailed FY2025-FY2027 Salaries & Expenses and Construction tables (positions, , and dollar amounts) and the program-area breakdown (Intelligence; Counterterrorism/Counterintelligence; Criminal Enterprises/Federal Crimes; Criminal Justice Services) -- the source for this entry's FY2026 Enacted budget and staffing KPIs, the FY2025-vs-FY2026 comparison, and the budget-by-program figure. Also the source for the 's field-office/Legat footprint. Wayback save-page-now request returned HTTP 520 (known escalated outage, same limitation logged on other agencies' justice.gov captures this series); the url above (fetched directly with a standard browser user agent) is the direct original document. justice.gov
- Federal Bureau of Investigation, Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), Federal Bureau of Investigation Internet Crime Report 2025 (Internet Crime Complaint Center, 25th anniversary edition) (2026-04-01) — The 's own annual public report on cyber-enabled crime complaints -- the source for this entry's 2025 complaint/loss workload figures and the IC3 Recovery Asset Team's Financial Fraud Kill Chain freeze statistics (the mechanism behind this entry's 'why is it good for society' section). Wayback save-page-now request returned HTTP 520 (known escalated outage); the url above is the direct original document, mirrored identically at fbi.gov/file-repository/2025_ic3report.pdf. ic3.gov
- U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. Population Growth Slows Due to Historic Decline in Net International Migration (Vintage 2025 national population estimate) (2026-01-27) — The Census Bureau's own Vintage 2025 national population estimate release, giving the U.S. resident population as of July 1, 2025 -- the per-resident denominator for this entry's cost-per-person KPI, per better_metrics.md's sourced-denominator discipline. Independently re-fetched and re-confirmed for this entry (same document already cited in good-citizen-gao). Wayback save-page-now request returned HTTP 520 (known escalated outage); the url above (fetched directly with a standard browser user agent, HTTP 200) is the direct original document. census.gov
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The traces to July 26, 1908, when Attorney General Charles Bonaparte ordered Department of Justice lawyers to route investigations to a new corps of Justice Department detectives, after Congress barred the department from borrowing U.S. Secret Service agents. Executive Order 6166 (1933) folded that force into a Division of Investigation, and the Act of March 22, 1935 renamed it the Federal Bureau of Investigation, now codified at 28 U.S.C. § 531 as a component of the Department of Justice. Its Director serves a single, nonrenewable ten-year term, set by Congress in 1976⧉.