Kash Patel, FBI Deliver a Monumental Win After

FBI Director Kash Patel announced Friday that the bureau has cleared a DNA processing backlog that once held practically 2 million samples, ending a pileup that saved probably useful profiles out of the national system used to help clear up violent crimes.

Patel said the backlog stood at 1.81 million samples on Aug. 1, 2024. It is now zero, according to the director, after the FBI Laboratory Division added gear, shifted assets, improved its data technology systems and modified how it tracked the work.

You requested for outcomes, we made the adjustments essential for this FBI to deliver- one instance, DNA:

We are statutorily required under the “DNA Fingerprint Act of 2005” to obtain and course of collected DNA samples from federally convicted offenders, arrestees, and non-U.S. citizen…

— FBI Director Kash Patel (@FBIDirectorKash) August 21, 2026

Patel wrote:

We are statutorily required under the “DNA Fingerprint Act of 2005” to obtain and course of collected DNA samples from federally convicted offenders, arrestees, and non-U.S. citizen detainees.

These samples are required to be despatched to the FBI Laboratory Division (LD) for processing – we get around 50k a month. This actually solves crimes across the nation, like unsolved homicides, mass shootings, inappropriate assaults, and other violent offenses.

He continued:

“There had been a massive backlog at the FBI Lab for decades. On August 1, 2024, the pending DNA backlog for these samples was over 1.81 million, literally breaking federal statutory requirements. A typical example of institutionalized bureaucracy from prior leadership that left crimes across America unsolved.”

This was not a stack of DNA evidence taken from crime scenes or untested rape kits sitting in local police evidence rooms. The backlog concerned standardized samples collected from federally convicted offenders, arrestees and non-U.S. citizen detainees. The FBI processes those samples for entry into the Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, where law enforcement can examine them with DNA recovered in unsolved instances.

The FBI’s own fiscal 12 months 2027 finances request backs up the dimensions of the mess Patel inherited. It says the CODIS processing backlog reached 1.8 million samples by the end of fiscal 12 months 2024 and was growing by an average of 75,000 samples a month. The bureau may course of roughly 100,000 samples yearly with its current base assets, even as it acquired between 360,000 and 480,000 each 12 months. 

“These large and sustained volume increases quickly outpaced DNA program resources. At the end of FY 2024, the CODIS processing backlog had reached 1.8 million, increasing by an average of 75,000 samples per month.”

The backlog was years in the making. A 2020 rule change expanded necessary DNA assortment to DHS detainees, and month-to-month submissions climbed above 50,000. The Biden-era border surge accelerated the issue, pushing month-to-month averages to 146,000 after the end of Title 42, with more than 180,000 samples arriving in February 2024 alone.

The surge later eased. The FBI said border apprehension adjustments pushed submissions down to about 40,000 a month in fiscal 12 months 2025, giving the lab room to start digging out. The bureau also requested 45 positions and $23.435 million for federal DNA databasing and laboratory work, including contract technicians, assortment kits, chemical compounds, storage and Rapid DNA technology.

Read More: Kash Patel’s Victory Lap on the FBI’s Record of Fighting Fraud Teases the National Campaign to Combat It

DNA backlogs at the FBI are hardly new. A Justice Department inspector common audit discovered that the bureau once cut a separate convicted-offender, arrestee and detainee backlog from more than 312,000 samples in December 2009 to a regular month-to-month workload of about 14,000 by May 2011. Automation, new hires and high-throughput robotics did a lot of that work.

The numbers then obtained away from the bureau all over again. Patel says his crew has dragged the pending rely back to zero and thanked the FBI Lab Division for getting it finished.

Those swabs had been collected so detectives may search them, not so the FBI may store them. Now they’ll

Editor’s Note: The American people overwhelmingly help President Trump’s law and order agenda.

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