In President Donald Trump’s address to Congress on Tuesday, he announced a major counterterrorism victory: the arrest of an ISIS member allegedly responsible for the murder of 13 American servicemembers and 169 Afghan civilians in Kabul in 2021. “America is once again standing strong against the forces of radical Islamic terrorism,” he boasted.

But national security experts are taking a more cautious approach in their assessments of the Trump administration’s posture when it comes to combating terrorist threats. 

As FBI Director Kash Patel has begun to shake up the bureau to bring America’s top law enforcement agency more in line with Trump’s priorities, concerns have emerged about whether the removal of top personnel and the rerouting of resources to immigration enforcement could lead to gaps in the agency’s counterterrorism work. 

“One way he’s addressed it is to put a great number of agents with counterterrorism experience on ice because of their involvement [investigating] Jan. 6,” said Daniel Richman, a Columbia Law School professor who served as an advisor to former FBI Director James Comey. “Another way he’s addressed it is to take some of the most senior leaders who would help coordinate counterterrorism efforts and remove them.”

Robert Wells, the agent in charge of the FBI’s national security division, was fired, New York magazine reported, as was Ryan Young, the bureau’s chief of intelligence. After the firing of these high-level appointees, many of the FBI’s 38,000 employees are left wondering whether they will face the same kind of cuts that Trump has made at other federal agencies. 

“It’s a massively important agency for our national security that does vital work combating terrorism and collecting intelligence, and you really need to take any reform suggestions with a scalpel, rather than with a chainsaw,” said Timothy Edgar, a Harvard Law School professor who held roles in the intelligence community in the Bush and Obama administrations. “I feel like Kash Patel, at least rhetorically, has been advocating for the chainsaw approach.”

Early in his career, Patel was a public defender in South Florida. From 2014-2017, he worked as a trial attorney in the U.S. Department of Justice’s national security division. He left that job to serve as a lawyer at the House Intelligence Committee. 

In that role, Patel worked his way into Trump’s inner circle by making a name for himself as one of the biggest critics of federal investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. He was the lead author of a 2018 report by former Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) that claimed the FBI had used questionable methods to obtain an intelligence warrant to surveil Trump advisor Carter Page during the 2016 campaign. 

Patel left Capitol Hill to serve as the senior director of counterterrorism at the National Security Council toward the end of Trump’s first term. Before leaving office, Trump considered appointing Patel deputy director of the FBI, which then-Attorney General William Barr said would happen “over my dead body,” Barr later wrote in a memoir. 

Patel spent the four years that Trump was out of office sticking by Trump’s side, even as some former allies, like Barr, abandoned Trump after the violent events of Jan. 6. Patel called people charged with crimes on Jan. 6 “political prisoners,” and referred to the investigations as “baseless prosecutions.” When announcing his nomination of Patel, Trump said he will “bring back Fidelity, Bravery and Integrity to the FBI.” 

As a political ally of the president’s, Patel is an unusual pick to lead the FBI, a position usually kept at arm’s length from partisan politics. Chris Wray, the FBI’s previous director who was also nominated by Trump, was in the middle of his 10-year term when he stepped down to make way for Patel. Patel had pledged publicly to name a career FBI agent to the deputy director role, but instead he picked right-wing podcaster and former Secret Service agent Dan Bongino.

“The deputy was always the pivotal person at the bureau, someone with incredibly deep experience and wisdom, who could work with a director who often came from outside,” said Richman. “There is no reason to expect him to be able to do that.” Bongino was one of the most prolific media figures in spreading the false claim that the results of the 2020 election were tainted by voter fraud and that victory had been “stolen” from Trump. 

“The biggest concern to me, apart from the partisan orientation of the leadership, is losing all the experience that was at the bureau and in the Department of Justice, not only in the Biden administration, but going back even into the previous Trump administration,” said William Banks, a national security expert at Syracuse Law School. “It seems like there’s a litmus test.”

Michael Masters, a former Chicago Police Department official who serves as CEO of the Secure Community Network, pointed out that law enforcement actions against terrorists have not stopped. He has not yet seen changes to the FBI’s counterterrorism work that raises any alarm bells for SCN, which provides security services to Jewish nonprofits and is in close contact with local, state and federal law enforcement.

“One thing that is important to recognize is that the work of our federal law enforcement partners in terms of identifying, indicting, arresting and prosecuting individuals that pose a threat to the community continues, and we are staying focused on that,” he told Jewish Insider on Wednesday. “We recognize that leadership changes come with personnel moves and personnel changes, and we also recognize the administration’s ongoing attention to the concerns of our community.”

Last month, Attorney General Pam Bondi established a task force focused on prosecuting perpetrators of the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attacks and pledged to also investigate acts of terrorism committed by Hamas supporters in the U.S. 

Still, the top priority of the Justice Department in the second Trump administration has been the deportation of undocumented immigrants accused of committing crimes. Jonathan Lewis, a research fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, called it “concerning” to “shift resources away from counterterrorism over to something like immigration.”

“I think that that definitely serves to create a more permissive environment for these domestic actors who are already feeling emboldened as a result of the current state of affairs in the U.S.,” added Lewis. 

A spokesperson for the FBI said the bureau “must handle a variety of threats in order to protect the American people.”

“The FBI is assisting the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies on immigration enforcement. At the same time we are very focused on protecting the U.S. and U.S. interests from terrorism,” the spokesperson told JI, referring to the Tuesday arrest of Mohammad Sharifullah for his alleged involvement in the 2021 Afghanistan attack. 

But the gutting of leadership and expertise at the FBI has not quelled concerns about whether gaps may exist between the bureau’s stated goals of fighting terrorism and the ability to do so, which requires knowledge of intricate federal guidelines and intelligence procedures, particularly given Patel’s criticism over the years of the FBI’s intelligence-gathering methods. 

“There’s been some concern about what would happen if we were facing another potential 9/11 attack, and the FBI and other agencies come across important intelligence information,” said Edgar. “Would we potentially have another intelligence failure? And I would say the risk of that is very high.”