Bongino Returns To Civilian Life — A Look Back And A Look Forward At What’s Next

Dan Bongino was one of many surprise picks in Trump’s 2025 cabinet, as he was called in with the specific task of restoring public trust in the FBI.

There has been no end of drama around what he has and hasn’t done in his tenure, who he does and doesn’t get along with, and whether or not he’s sold out to establishment interests in the time he returned to public service.

As a larger-than-life MAGA personality with an enormously successful podcast, and books/reporting that were ahead of the curve on everything from Crossfire Hurricane, to Hunter’s Laptop, to the questions swirling around the J6 Bomber case (not to mention the wholesale weaponization of government agencies against Trump and his GOP allies), expectations went through the roof when it was announced he would be serving to help right the ship in the FBI.

To evaluate his time in that service, we need to go back to the time before he took on that role, and level-set both expectations about the hype, and remind ourselves about past instances where he displayed his character.

He never asked for this job

For anyone paying attention, many of Trump’s appointees are the opposite of the political social-climbers who see a government appointment as the next stepping stone on their advancement. People like Dan Bongino, among others was already wildly successful in his personal life. Time spent in public office was a step down in both income and (in many ways) prestige from the life he enjoyed as a civilian.

It’s a crazy little thing we used to call ‘public service’.

Before he ever took that job, when listeners asked him about it, he made it clear he would only take on an assignment like the FBI if he thought he could make a meaningful difference. He was not interested in going there to mark time and shuffle papers.

He saw a serious trust deficit there and said, in his own flamboyant style, that the entire operation needed to be stripped down to the studs and rebuilt. He has not going there to get an eye for an eye (as many MAGA people might have hoped) so much as to restore a rule of law with no fear or favor to people of any political stripe or income bracket.

Some outstanding questions of wrongdoing would require investigation (and he personally spent hours sitting in SCIFs looking through misfiled papers in getting to the bottom of such questions), but the real focus needed to be a return to police work and catching bad guys instead of clustering in DC hobnobbing with politicians and journos while angling for your next political promotion.

If he couldn’t accomplish any such changes he wasn’t interested in taking the job. And just before he took his oath, he reminded his many fans and followers that, for the time he served in that appointment, he would not be wearing the red jersey of political activism he all saw on the Bongino Show… but (to continue the metaphor) the black-and-white stripes of an impartial referee.

And what was the reminder he would give us even after he was appointed? He encouraged us to judge him, not by the rhetoric, but by the results.

Judging Those Results

Social media has no end of criticism of his work in the FBI.

From unconfirmed rumors of conflict with Pam Bondi, to outrage over mishandling of the Epstein file, and the endless circulation of the meme ‘for the love of God, arrest somebody’, we need to check results against the expectations we saw above.

High on his list was the unanswered J6 Pipe Bomber question. On that question, an arrest has been made and criminal process is underway. We also finally heard the number 274, which is the number of plainclothes FBI agents present on January 6, 2021, a number Wray had stubbornly refused to produce to Congress.

As for the time Bongino spent in that SCIF? It has paid off in tranch after tranch of prefiously-concealed information that has since been declassified and handed over to Oversight for review. Bondi has made mention that criminal prosecutions for those involved in Crossfire Hurricane are still under consideration.

But as we saw with other high-profile trials — whether the cases against Trump, or more recent cases against Letitia James and James Comey, it’s important to have all the i’s dotted and t’s crossed if you don’t want the case thrown out completely.

For anyone suggesting he’s ‘on the take’ for Epstein, or any other story, we remind our readers that Bongino walked away from the security of those golden handcuffs (government pension) so that he could put his money where his mouth was and run for Congress. The attempt nearly bankrupted him, but it also put him on the trajectory that made him a national figure. He also put his radio contract on the line in a fight over compulsory C-19 vaccines.

What he really wanted to achieve was to put federal law enforcement back on track, turning them loose on the key task of catching child predators, illegal aliens, gang-bangers and the like… instead of grandmothers praying outside of abortion mills.

If you scroll through his timeline on X, you will see the accomplishments the FBI has seen during his tenure… the arrests made, drugs and guns off the street, children saved from the clutches of criminals, and so on.

On December 3, Dan published a tweet listing the fundamental structural changes he had helped make within the FBI.

Dan Bongino @FBIDDBongino Dec 3, 2025
Some updates for you regarding important changes and reforms we made at your FBI:

-The Director and I made a decision earlier this year to reorganize the FBI to both improve efficiency and accountability. Pursuant to process, those changes were signed off on and completed recently.

-The Director and I made a long series of important personnel changes. The new leadership team has produced dramatic results which we will produce for you, in detail, as the year wraps up. They will include a historic drop in the homicide rate, along with record disruptions, arrests and drug interdictions. Many of these personnel changes have upset a group of Comey-Wray era disgruntled former agents who prefer the old ways of operating. We are not going back.

-We have been working on an AI project to assist our investigators and analysts in the national security space. I received an update yesterday and I am happy to report that the product looks promising. More coming on this.

– We are in the end stages of a redesign of the FBI crisis management process. The redesign is intended to make information more accessible and transparent in a crisis to enable quick and effective decision making. The project should be complete by the end of the calendar year.

-We saved the taxpayers billions of dollars by scrapping the plan for an expensive new FBI headquarters building. We will be moving to the existing Reagan building after decades of fruitless haggling as the current FBI headquarters building crumbles.

-We relocated over a thousand headquarters based personnel out of the Washington DC area and into the field to focus on violent crime, crimes against children, and terrorism. Those agents are now working on the mission in those regional offices.

-In recognition of the growing threat, and in conjunction with the President’s Executive Order, we designed, launched and completed the FBI’s first-ever counter-drone school last month. Special thanks to Sebastian Gorka and DDCOS Regan for their help on the project.

-The work force apprehended 4 of the FBI’s 10 most wanted fugitives, and we are hunting down the rest.

-We produced unprecedented disclosures, and took action on documents related to January 6, Crossfire Hurricane, Arctic Frost, and more.

-The new leadership team, and the work force, made a series of ANTIFA related arrests in multiple states and assisted in record numbers of deportations and apprehensions.

-Some of the culture changes we implemented include eliminating DEI, reforming the physical fitness test, making promotions contingent on real world results, severing ties with the SPLC and ADL, and implementing a new training curriculum to reflect current mission requirements.

-We dedicated significant personnel and financial assets to streamlining FOIA reform to ensure responsiveness.

-We shut down multiple open air drug markets nationwide and, in conjunction with the White House, had 12 fentanyl precursors from China listed.

-We created CIO and CTO positions to work with the CFO to find efficiencies and implement new technologies to assist in our mission. We conduct bi-weekly meetings and we have found and eliminated tens of millions of dollars in duplicative contracts, unnecessary real estate, and outdated technology. These are real savings to the taxpayer and each budget dollar allocated is intensely scrutinized for value.

-We vastly expanded the overseas biometrics program to stop bad actors before they board a plane or vessel to the US. This gives us the ability to expand the border outwards and prevent the problems from coming here.

-We are in the end stages of a reform project on our intelligence analysis positions to make them more responsive to current mission needs. We have been working with the field on this and we’re happy with the progress.

-We implemented a technology working group to ensure our technology tools evolve with the mission.

Thank you, and God bless America and all those who defend Her. 🇺🇸

Those of us who read that, and knew that Dan didn’t want to stick around in a government job for any longer than he felt he could make a meaningful difference there, did not find his announcement to return to civilian life at the end of the year surprising at all.

What To Expect Moving Forward

With so much riding on the midterm results, Dan probably made the calculated decision that he could make a better difference in helping his changes ‘stick’ past the midterms if he reconnects with the fans he affectionately calls his ‘Bongino Army’ than he could as part of the FBI brass.

The changes he wanted to see happen? He’s checked those boxes.

But as one of the Big Dawgs in the Conservative podcast space, he could do more to move the needle culturally in that space in an election cycle than he could in an executive role at the FBI.

Prediction: we’re going to see him back in his chair at the Bongino show, as loud and opinionated as ever, and he will continue with the ‘happy warrior’ content his fans had come to know.

He’s going to come back with a new passion, a new perspective, and some inside information on what has been standing in the way of the results we’ve been looking for all this time.

And now that he’s back in civilian life, he doesn’t have to be nuanced and neutral in anything he has to say.

I can’t help but wonder if the Dems will soon be wishing he was back in his suit at the FBI building.