Many FBI agents based in cities with a high cost of living are struggling to make ends meet, forcing them to make hours-long commutes or double up in apartments, according to bureau and Justice Department officials.
Natalie Bara, president of the FBI Agents Association, said she’s heard from two or three agents sharing an apartment near New York City, and others who commute four hours each day, back and forth to their field offices. Some circumstances are even more extreme, she added.
“They’re having to juggle being able to afford rent and/or utilities versus being able to actually buy groceries, so it’s getting to a level where it’s becoming very, very difficult to not only recruit agents into these high cost of living areas, but also retain them in those areas,” said Bara, who is a second-generation FBI agent.
I just… I don’t… do I feel bad for cops when they can’t afford houses either?
This one is a hard one, but I kind of fall on the side of empathy here…
Everyone should deserve a home. Maybe that home should be a cell if you’re a racist power tripping murderer, but if you out here genuinely trying to protect your community/country, you deserve a home.
And full healthcare, especially for rural volunteer firefighters and emergency medical technicians, many of them are volunteers. They deserve to be protected and treated fully by the services they put their lives on the line to provide for.
Some even have to pay for their training and their equipment. I get needing barriers for entry to dangerous positions but that feels like an economic barrier for an essential service.
It’s funny in a depressing way. The people who may save your life in a car crash are running off 4 hours of sleep and debating wether to spend money on food or cell service. An ambulance ride can easily cost north of 1k for you. The EMTs might get like $40 each.
Apparently this has to be explained since many people are making this mistake: FBI agents are not cops. They are investigators. They investigate crimes. They don’t sit around eating donuts or drive around a local “beat”.
They are the main organization investigating hate crimes and all those Jan 6 nuts. They didn’t arrest your friend for a joint back in 2015.
Can they arrest people accused of committing crimes? Yes. They’re cops. They’re just not city cops.
Maybe the silver lining is that an FBI employee gets paid roughly the same as every other federal agency employee, barring some weird locality and specialization pays.
It’s not as powerful to say a national parks employee or a bureau of X worker is struggling to make ends meet because they’re typically not exciting or sexy conversation points. I wholeheartedly believe that this is affecting way more than just the FBI workforce.
What we’re seeing is that costs have risen above and beyond what every single typical government employee is making and that lawmakers have not made any deliberate efforts to increase federal pay outside of the yearly sub-inflation pay increases. Add to that the inability to pass budgets on time and you have a few million people who aren’t getting paid enough to match their lifestyle for the previous year, every year, with added stressors of somehow saving money to account for not being paid for indeterminate amounts of time thanks to government shutdowns which are solved literal hours before coming into effect. Federal service isn’t a glamorous or high paying career field, but it’s supposed to be a stable one which provides enough to live with. Now, we’re seeing that slowly erode.
But will the blame be placed on the right people, or will this once again be people falling for “progressives are communists” propaganda?
I see two solutions. Lawmakers can increase federal schedule pay or the private sector (retail, landlords?) can reduce their prices.
Expecting companies to drop prices of most goods and services even 10% to match pre-COVID values is unrealistic and unlikely. Expecting some mass movement to reduce revenue and profit in the name of humanity is some sci-fi utopian plot line.
Lawmakers increasing pay is more realistic, but still unlikely. We’re slowly seeing more people aware of the dysfunction from within congress, but millions of people still vote in representatives that poison budget bills that directly affect their livelihoods.
It’s almost like the reverse of that quote that I’ll butcher: “it’s hard for a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it.” I almost want to say they get what they deserve, but they make the same bed as so many others who have to suffer the consequences and are trying to make a difference.
No. No. No.
The real, and only solution (as devised by uber-mega-filthy-bloodyhands-wealthy) is:
Abolish government. Private cops, Private law and order, Private power
But only theirs.
And once theirs, the private cops will be lavishly remunerated.
The basic playbook: blame it, break it, destroy it, control it.
And a pension plan eating 4.4% of every paycheck that they totally promise won’t go the way of social security and be empty by the time most new hires will be able to retire (lol retirement, good one). There is a MASSIVE block of federal employees approaching retirement, and already eligible for it.
A major difference between FBI agents and most other government positions, is that FBI agents don’t get to decide where they want to work. They list their “preferences” about what city they would like to work in and then those preferences are largely ignored. In other words, the local cost of living whenever they end up is completely out of their control.
It doesn’t matter if the agent lives in Phoenix, and listed it as their top preference, the LA, NY and Chicago branches are the largest, so that’s where many agents will end up. What might be a great salary for living in Phoenix, is probably totally unmanageable for living in NYC.
I might not feel as bad for them, they certainly made their choice of career to be cops, but at the end of the day its the institutions under capitalsim that hurt us the most, the individuals are just tools of the system, if Billy-bob McOfficer quits being a cop, Randall DiCopper will be there to replace them and the system continues.
And even though they are cops, they are also human beings too, also caught up in an abusive and exploitative system.
They were subject to the same propaganda we all were and no one is immune, so yes, feeling empathy is OK.
Also there is a huge potential problem when you give a group lots of power and then under pay them. They are a lot easier to bribe.
Makes them easier to bribe.