The FBI received a record number of new agent applications in Director Kash Patel’s first full month leading the bureau, with the flood of law enforcement job-seekers nearly doubling the monthly average since 2016.

There were 5,577 new FBI agent applications submitted in March, Fox News Digital has learned. 

The last time the bureau saw a monthly figure even close to that number was April 2016, with 5,283 applications.

By comparison, the monthly average in 2023 was 2,797 applications, with 3,383 applications per month in 2024, according to FBI data reviewed by Fox News Digital.

‘Director Patel and Deputy Director (Dan) Bongino have put a major emphasis on restoring confidence in federal law enforcement and boosting new agent recruiting,’ FBI spokesman Ben Williamson told Fox News Digital Wednesday. ‘These record early returns certainly suggest the new FBI is heading in the right direction.’  

Since January, the FBI has seen more than 10,000 new agent applications, according to FBI data. 

In January, the first month of the Trump administration and the month of Patel’s nomination and confirmation hearing, the FBI saw 4,143 applications to join the bureau – the first time the bureau had seen a month of new agent applications in the 4,000s since August 2020. 

‘The record number of FBI job applications in March shows that people are inspired by Kash Patel’s commitment to restoring integrity and effectiveness at the bureau,’ Patel advisor Erica Knight told Fox News Digital Wednesday. ‘Americans are putting their trust in his leadership to rebuild the FBI and keep our communities safe.’ 

And, Knight told Fox News Digital, ‘this is just the beginning.’ 

‘Kash is dedicated to creating a stronger, more trusted FBI that serves the American people the way it was always meant to,’ Knight said. 

During his Senate confirmation hearing in late January, Patel illustrated the ‘erosion of trust’ at the bureau, pointing to polling revealing that ‘only 40% of Americans hold a favorable view of the FBI.’ 

‘This must change,’ Patel testified. ‘Public cooperation is vital for the bureau to solve crimes, and its declining reputation is already affecting recruitment efforts.’ 

The record number of new agent applications comes as Patel and Bongino put a heavy emphasis on new agent recruiting and restoring law enforcement morale by ‘letting good cops be cops.’ 

In March, Patel released an FBI recruitment video, showing the director in the field with agents and highlighting footage from the hostage rescue team facility urging people to join the team. 

The video ends with a graphic showing the FBI seal, and the words: ‘A renewed mission. A stronger future.’ 

‘Apply today at FBIJobs.gov,’ the video says. 

Patel and Bongino also have privately emphasized to their staff the importance of boosting local partner engagement. 

Sources familiar told Fox News Digital that Patel has instructed his team to offer full and total support to the families of fallen officers, while Bongino has personally reached out and met with the uniformed officers on FBI ground to thank them for their work that ‘often goes unnoticed.’

‘Our team will continue to recruit the best law enforcement personnel in the country,’ Williamson told Fox News Digital. ‘We hope to see even more brave men and women want to be a part of what we’re building.’ 

Vice President JD Vance said the message in a new docuseries echoed the direction of the Trump administration’s recent actions – and the rest of the world would be wise to take notice. 

He offered remarks Tuesday night at an exclusive screening of the film adaptation of author Rod Dreher’s ‘Live Not By Lies’ – first-hand interviews with civilian figures throughout the postwar period who embraced Christian values to blunt totalitarian regimes and efforts from Great Britain to Czechoslovakia when it was part of the Soviet bloc

Vance said he got to know Dreher after the writer asked to interview him about his book, ‘Hillbilly Elegy,’ before the now-vice president was a fixture on the political scene.

Before boarding a flight back to the U.S. from a vacation in the United Kingdom, Vance submitted written answers to Dreher and hoped for the best – his book was hovering around No. 1,000 on the Amazon list. By the time he landed in the U.S., Dreher’s write-up had propelled it to No. 16.

‘Hillbilly Elegy’ later inspired a Ron Howard film, and helped launch Vance into the spotlight as a nationally recognized figure. He would go on to win a seat in the Senate and eventually become vice president.

Dreher’s book and film, which featured interviews with notable dissidents of communism and totalitarianism in the Soviet bloc and even in England today, is a lesson for people of Christian and democratic values not to lose hope and ‘never stop fighting,’ Vance said.

He said that, without the courage to act in the face of government-compelled groupthink, the traditionalist West cannot ‘reclaim our civilization… rebuild prosperity and opportunity [or] rebuild the kind of society where we teach children the important virtues and skills to thrive; as opposed to trying to tear our kids down, which is what I think our education system does all too often.’

Without speaking up, people who seek liberty over tyranny cannot defeat the left-wing foreign policy groupthink that has become the ‘animating concept’ in too many Western nations, the vice president added.

‘We’re not going to solve any of these problems unless we have the courage to speak the truth, unless we have the courage to live the truth.’

One thing the traditionalist right struggles with is submitting to despair, Vance said.

‘This idea that because things were not going great in 2020, because things weren’t always going in our way electorally, we would give into this sense that the country that we love, the civilization that we love was always on a negative trajectory,’ he said.

‘And I say that as not a criticism of Rod, because I, myself, have sometimes felt in the lowest moments of American politics that, maybe, this country is just not going in the right direction.’

‘But I think that what we’ve learned over the last few months is that the American people, and I think Western peoples, are a hell of a lot more resilient than our elites give them credit for.’

Vance said ‘Live Not By Lies’ – a phrase itself coined by Soviet exile Alexander Solzhenitsyn in one of his famous oratories – means to maintain the same optimism that is at the root of Judeo-Christian theology and therefore the root of American traditions.

‘You have Western peoples calling out their governments pushing back on issues like migration and religious freedom in a way that we haven’t seen in 20 or 30 years – if we’ve ever seen it,’ he said.

‘If we keep on fighting and we keep working and we keep on having faith and we keep on pursuing the values that we know are right, I really do believe that we are going to see great things happen… all across the West. I know the president knows this.’

Vance said the message of ‘Live Not By Lies’ has been proven in the first months of the fledgling Trump-Vance administration.

‘We’ve gone from a country where we would harass and threaten and investigate and even arrest pro-life protesters to one where we’re encouraging pro-life activists to do what they can to persuade their fellow Americans,’ Vance said.

The film and book show British pro-life leader Isabel Vaughan-Spruce recounting being arrested essentially for praying outside an abortion clinic, and feature video of London police interrogating her on the street to find out what she was praying about.

‘A couple of months ago, we had social media censorship run amok. We were threatening people’s right of free expression for not saying the things that Silicon Valley technology companies told them to say,’ Vance went on.

‘Now I believe that we have more free speech on the internet today than we’ve probably had in 10 or 15 years. So we’re making progress.’

UNITED NATIONS – The DOGE Caucus just got a consulting offer from an initiative looking to remove waste in the United Nations. 

Dynamic Oversight for Global Efficiencies in the U.N. (DOGE-U.N.) is looking to help the caucus identify cost-cutting opportunities and hold the U.N. accountable.

‘Accountability should extend beyond domestic institutions to global organizations that America funds. And they all should operate with fiscal responsibility and proper oversight,’ DOGE-U.N. wrote in a letter to Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, who founded the Senate DOGE Caucus.

Last month, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres announced the UN80 Initiative in honor of the 80th anniversary of the international organization. Despite speculation that the initiative was a response to Elon Musk’s work with DOGE, Guterres told reporters that it was completely unrelated. Guterres said the project is meant to handle the U.N.’s ongoing ‘liquidity crisis.’

‘For at least the past seven years, the United Nations has faced a liquidity crisis given the fact that not all member states pay in full, and many member states also do not pay on time,’ secretary-general spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric told Fox News Digital at the time. ‘This is about prudent spending planning to ensure that we can continue to fulfill our core functions and the mandates given to us by member states.’

Hugh Dugan, the head of DOGE-U.N., told Fox News Digital that this is an opportunity to reform the U.N., which has not undergone any significant overhaul since 2000. Dugan also emphasized that the U.N. should be under this type of scrutiny more frequently and not just when the U.S. is ‘frustrated with’ the organization.

Under Musk, DOGE first tackled waste at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which drew significant criticism. President Donald Trump listed several examples of the ways USAID allegedly wasted U.S. taxpayer dollars, including millions of dollars that went to diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in other countries.

Dugan told Fox News Digital that a significant portion of USAID funding was ‘funneled’ through U.N. entities. He believes the ‘money trail will definitely be taking us through many of those entities, whether it’s peacekeeping or a U.N. development program.’

In its letter, DOGE-U.N. lists several recommendations for the DOGE Caucus, including decentralizing New York-based U.N. entities to lower-cost countries, which the organization said could save ‘at least 40% in salaries alone.’ DOGE-U.N. also recommends an audit of the U.N.’s ongoing ‘liquidity crisis.’

The U.S. is not the only country rethinking its contributions to the international body. Dugan told Fox News Digital that other countries are also reevaluating their spending, but the U.S. is ‘the most colorful and biggest’ because of Musk.

Dugan ultimately pointed the finger at Guterres and told Fox News Digital that there are ‘whispers and grumblings among ambassadors’ who are allegedly dissatisfied with the secretary-general’s performance. Senior U.N. insiders allegedly told Dugan that they too are ‘very eager’ to see things turn around ‘sooner rather than later.’

Ernst’s office did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.

OTTAWA – As Canadians brace themselves for President Donald Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ of reciprocal tariffs on Wednesday, one political leader in Canada believes it could spark the start of a new era of Canada-U.S. relations free of cross-border taxes.

Maxime Bernier, who served as foreign affairs minister in former Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative government and now heads the right-wing People’s Party of Canada (PPC), told Fox News Digital in an interview from Halifax that it is ‘absolutely’ the time for Canada to remove all tariffs against the U.S.

He said the 25% duties the Canadian government, under then-Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, imposed on the U.S. in early February to counter Trump’s 25% tariffs against Canada ‘won’t hurt the Americans – it is hurting Canadians.’

New Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said in a statement following his March 28 call with the president – the first contact between both leaders since Carney was elected Liberal leader by his party nearly three weeks before – that Canada would implement retaliatory tariffs in response to Wednesday’s U.S. ‘trade actions.’

The PPC leader said that Trump should be told that ‘the real reciprocal response’ to tariffs is ‘zero on our side, zero on your side.’

Bernier said that instead, Carney and his main rival, Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre, are being ‘fake patriots using a dollar-for-dollar trade war against Trump’ and telling Canadians: ‘That’s the best thing to do.’

‘We cannot impose counter-tariffs,’ said Bernier, who also served as industry minister in the Harper government. 

‘The Americans are 10 times bigger than us. We won’t win a trade war,’ he said, underscoring that retaliation will lead to a recession in Canada.

Former Canadian Conservative politician Tony Clement, who served alongside Bernier in Harper’s Cabinet, told Fox News Digital that ‘from an economic point of view,’ removing Canadian tariffs ‘makes a lot of sense’ and ‘may come to that at some point, but the public isn’t there right now.’

‘From a point of view of the emotional wounds of Canadians created by Trump and his annexation talk and tariffs, I’m not sure that a political voice would survive if it went down that public-policy route,’ said Clement, a former Canadian industry minister in the Harper government.

‘The mood of the people is outrage. I’ve never seen people in Canada this incandescently mad at the United States,’ he said, who is campaigning in the Toronto area for Poilievre’s Conservative Party ahead of the April 28 general election. ‘There is complete distrust of whatever Trump says because it can change within 24 hours.’

He said that both Poilievre and Carney have highlighted the importance of removing ‘the specter of tariffs for a long period of time – if you can trust Trump to be a bona fide negotiator.’

Eliminating Canadian tariffs, without a quid pro quo from Trump, could ‘show weakness to a bully,’ added Clement, who, prior to entering federal politics in 2006, served as a Cabinet minister in former Ontario Premier Mike Harris’ Progressive Conservative government.  

In the statement released following his recent conversation with Trump, Carney said that both leaders ‘agreed to begin comprehensive negotiations about a new economic and security relationship immediately following the election.’ 

Conservative strategist Yaroslav Baran, who served as communications chief for Harper’s successful Conservative 2004 leadership campaign, and director of war room communications for the Harper-led Tories during the 2004, 2006 and 2008 federal election campaigns, told Fox News Digital that under the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), ‘trade in goods and services ought to be tariff-free’ between Canada and the U.S., excluding carveouts on the Canadian side for dairy, eggs, poultry and softwood lumber. 

However, Baran added that he ‘can’t see the removal of all Canadian tariffs on U.S. products as long as the U.S. has tariffs on Canadian products.’

Bernier acknowledged that while Trump’s tariffs will hurt Canadian exporters to the U.S., ‘the solution is to have a more productive economy with real free-market reforms’ in Canada through such measures as lowering corporate taxes, promoting internal trade and fostering growth in the country’s oil and gas industry, all of which are featured in the PPC’s election platform that includes the establishment of a ‘Department of Government Downsizing’ to abolish ‘ideologically motivated programs that promote wokeism,’ not unlike the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency.

The PPC leader also said that Canada should be willing to ‘put everything on the table’ under the USMCA ‘right now’ and before the trilateral trade deal is scheduled for a joint review next year.

According to Bernier, that should include ending the ‘cartel’ of supply management that sets quotas and prices, and protects Canada’s dairy, poultry and eggs sectors from foreign competition, which he described as ‘a communist system’ that finds Canadians paying twice the price of those agricultural products than Americans do in the U.S., and which also imposes duties – ranging from 150% to 300% — on U.S. imports of the same products beyond limits agreed to but yet to be reached under the USMCA. 

During the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 2018 that led to the USMCA, the first Trump administration sought to have Canada’s supply management system eliminated.

Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., condemned the Senate filibuster as an ‘abuse of power’ in 2022, years before his party praised him for launching the ‘longest filibuster in U.S. Senate history’ on Tuesday.

Booker set the record for longest Senate floor speech at 25 hours and 5 minutes after starting to speak at 7 p.m. on Monday. 

The filibuster has been a deeply controversial tool for the Senate in recent years, with many Democrats condemning the practice during President Joe Biden’s administration as Republicans used it to foil his agenda.

‘The filibuster has been abused to stop reforms supported by the vast majority of Americans—from background checks to protecting the right to vote. We must stop this abuse of power,’ Booker wrote on X in January 2022.

Booker’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fox News Digital.

Former Senator Kyrsten Sinema, who was the lone Democrat to oppose abolishing the filibuster during Biden’s administration, has poked fun at Democrats who criticized her at the time.

‘Maybe it isn’t an old Jim Crow relic, after all,’ she quipped about Booker’s performance on Tuesday, referencing President Barack Obama’s description of the filibuster.

Sinema specifically called out Rep. Pramila Jayapal. D-Wash., who condemned the ‘Jim Crow filibuster’ just last year.

Jayapal changed her tune when Republicans were trying to pass a continuing resolution in March, urging Democrats in the Senate, ‘Don’t betray working families. Don’t give Trump and Elon Musk a blank check. Don’t be complicit in the slashing of government programs. Vote NO on cloture and NO on final passage of Republicans’ bad bill.’

Cloture is the Senate term for ending a filibuster, causing Sinema to chime in, ‘Just surprised to see support for the ‘Jim Crow filibuster’ here,’ she wrote.

Booker himself has flipped on the issue multiple times. He gave a firm defense of the filibuster in 2019 before his call to remove it in 2022.

He said at the time that Democrats ‘should not be doing anything to mess with the strength of the filibuster.’

‘I will personally resist efforts to get rid of it,’ he said.

A federal judge blocked President Donald Trump’s administration from firing federal probationary workers in 19 states and Washington, D.C., on Wednesday.

U.S. District Court Judge James Bredar’s order directs 18 federal agencies to ‘undo’ the ‘purported terminations’ of thousands of probationary federal workers before Tuesday, April 8th, though the order only applies to states whose attorneys general brought the case.

The states impacted by Wednesday’s ruling include Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Wisconsin and the District of Columbia.

Bredar’s order is only the latest move by federal courts to hamper Trump’s agenda, though it falls short of the nationwide injunctions used in other instances.

Since Trump entered office, he has faced a slew of nationwide injunctions to halt actions of his administration. So far in his new term, the courts have hit him with roughly 15 wide-ranging orders, more than former Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden received during their entire tenures.

Some of those who have ordered the Trump administration to halt certain actions are U.S. District Judges James Boasberg, Amir Ali, Loren AliKhan, William Alsup, Deborah Boardman, John Coughenour, Paul A. Engelmayer, Amy Berman Jackson, Angel Kelley, Brendan A. Hurson, Royce Lamberth, Joseph Laplante, John McConnell and Leo Sorokin.

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich condemned the wave of injunctions as a ‘judicial coup d’etat’ during testimony before a House Judiciary subcommittee on Tuesday.

The former lawmaker highlighted that the vast majority of judges filing injunctions or restraining orders against Trump’s executive actions have been appointed by Democrats.

‘If you look at the recent reports from various polling firms, clearly a majority of Americans believe that no single district judge should be able to issue a nationwide injunction,’ Gingrich responded.

‘Look, my judgment is as a historian. This is clearly a judicial coup d’etat. You don’t have this many different judges issue this many different nationwide injunctions – all of them coming from the same ideological and political background – and just assume it’s all random efforts of justice,’ he continued.

‘This is a clear effort to stop the scale of change that President Trump represents,’ he added.

Fox News’ Julia Johnson contributed to this report

President Donald Trump, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., and Senate Budget Committee Republicans are meeting at the White House on Wednesday morning as discussions on how to extend the 2017 tax cuts continue and a key budget process to advance Trump’s agenda hangs in the balance. 

Notably, the meeting is taking place ahead of a Trump event in the Rose Garden, during which the president will discuss his new tariffs.

The Wednesday White House meeting is meant to be less of a debate on how to proceed and more of a final check-in to make sure all parties are on the same page, a source familiar told Fox News Digital.

Trump and Senate Republicans’ discussion is just the latest of several meetings on both the House and Senate sides, hammering out details on how to maneuver a House-passed budget reconciliation bill through the upper chamber. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was spotted leaving at least one of the congressional meetings on Wednesday and has been a fixture on Capitol Hill amid the reconciliation debate. 

Initially, there was stark disagreement between GOP leaders in the House and Senate over how to organize a reconciliation bill, which is a key tool for the Trump administration and Republican majorities, because it lowers the vote threshold in the Senate, bypassing the legislative filibuster. 

Senate Republicans largely preferred splitting the priorities of the Trump administration into two reconciliation bills, the first of which would address the southern border’s urgent needs and a later bill would extend Trump’s hallmark 2017 tax cuts. 

But House Republicans, who have less space for dissent with their slim majority, made it clear they would only accept one reconciliation bill that included border funding and tax cut extensions. 

The House and Senate both passed separate resolutions, but Trump has voiced his support for one bill on multiple occasions and Senate Republicans themselves described their resolution as a backup plan to the House’s. 

Now, the Senate is charged with taking up the House’s bill, including border and tax cuts, in order to complete the budget reconciliation process for Trump. 

Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., told Fox News he would be at the morning meeting at 11 a.m. He said he planned to bring up the debt limit, which will need to be extended soon. In particular, he wants to discuss raising the debt limit in the budget reconciliation resolution. 

According to the Republican, Trump hasn’t been highly communicative to Republicans about his position on the debt limit’s inclusion in this particular bill. 

But Kennedy believes they should raise the debt limit via reconciliation to ensure Republicans don’t need to negotiate with Democrats to avert default down the line. 

Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona, who ditched his Tesla last month, refused to label recent violence at Tesla dealerships in protest of Elon Musk’s DOGE efforts as ‘domestic terrorism,’ a term that has been used by Republicans and the Justice Department. 

Certainly vandalism and it’s a crime,’ Kelly told Fox News Digital when asked if the violence at Tesla dealerships in response to DOGE amounted to terrorism.

‘It’s a significant crime, especially if you’re going to firebomb a car or vandalize somebody’s vehicle or even key somebody’s vehicle. They shouldn’t be doing it. And these should be investigated. And if people are caught, they should be prosecuted.’

Attorney General Pam Bondi and Elon Musk have both called the violence ‘domestic terrorism’ in recent weeks.

When pressed by Fox News Digital on not using the word terrorism, Kelly said, ‘I think we got to tread lightly on the whole terrorism word.’

We sometimes try to expand this thing, it kind of loses its focus. But when folks are vandalizing people’s vehicles or dealerships, it is wrong and it’s dangerous. Somebody is going to get hurt. And for that reason, we should put, you know, the full force of law enforcement to this problem and prosecute people.’

While Kelly went further than most top Democrats in condemning the violence, many in the party have faced criticism from conservatives for refusing to use the phrase ‘domestic terrorism’ to describe violent incidents against Tesla, including shots fired at a building, destroyed dealership windows, charging stations and cars set on fire, and vandalism of Tesla cars.

Fox News Digital recently reached out to over a dozen Democrats who previously railed against the dangers of domestic terrorism, asking them if they condemned the Tesla violence. None of the Democrats responded.

Kelly made headlines last month when he announced that he was ditching his personal Tesla because it was ‘a rolling billboard for a man dismantling our government and hurting people.’ 

Kelly added that he believes Musk turned out to be an ‘a–hole’ and later announced that he had switched to a Chevy Tahoe SUV.

The violence against Tesla has spurred outrage on the right as many Democrats remain silent. Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., on Tuesday introduced a resolution in the House of Representatives that slams unnamed members of the Democratic Party, who it says, ‘have made calls for their supporters to incite and engage in domestic terrorism by attacking Tesla vehicles and facilities to protest Elon Musk.’

‘The definition of terrorism is the unlawful use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims. That is exactly what has been going on across the country at Tesla dealerships, and it is what innocent Americans who chose Tesla as their preferred vehicle are facing in the wake of violence from Radical Left-Wing domestic terrorists who hate President Donald Trump and Elon Musk,’ Boebert told Fox News Digital.

The resolution cites ‘at least’ 80 incidents of arson or vandalism against Tesla vehicles and 10 incidents of vandalism against Tesla dealerships, charging stations and facilities throughout the U.S. and Canada.

Incidents include individuals setting fire to cars and equipment by throwing Molotov cocktails, shooting up buildings and vehicles, and marking private property with words like ‘Nazi’ and ‘Long Live Ukraine.’

Among the incidents cited by the resolution is the March 18 attack in Las Vegas, in which a person dressed in black shot at Tesla cars at a Tesla collision center, ignited several of them with Molotov cocktails, and spray-painted the word ‘Resist’ on the front doors of the shop.

Fox News Digital’s Peter Pinedo contributed to this report.