FBI Director Kash Patel announced Friday that the bureau has cleared a DNA processing backlog that once held nearly 2 million samples, ending a pileup that kept potentially useful profiles out of the national system used to help solve 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 equipment, shifted resources, improved its information technology systems and changed how it tracked the work.
You asked for results, we made the changes necessary for this FBI to deliver- one example, DNA:
— FBI Director Kash Patel (@FBIDirectorKash) August 21, 2026
We are statutorily required under the “DNA Fingerprint Act of 2005” to receive and process collected DNA samples from federally convicted offenders, arrestees, and non-U.S. citizen…
Patel wrote:
We are statutorily required under the “DNA Fingerprint Act of 2005” to receive and process collected DNA samples from federally convicted offenders, arrestees, and non-U.S. citizen detainees.
These samples are required to be sent to the FBI Laboratory Division (LD) for processing – we get around 50k a month. This literally solves crimes across the country, like unsolved homicides, mass shootings, sexual 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 involved 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 compare them with DNA recovered in unsolved cases.
The FBI's own fiscal year 2027 budget request backs up the size of the mess Patel inherited. It says the CODIS processing backlog reached 1.8 million samples by the end of fiscal year 2024 and was growing by an average of 75,000 samples a month. The bureau could process roughly 100,000 samples annually with its existing base resources, even as it received between 360,000 and 480,000 each year.
“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 mandatory DNA collection to DHS detainees, and monthly submissions climbed above 50,000. The Biden-era border surge accelerated the problem, pushing monthly 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 changes pushed submissions down to about 40,000 a month in fiscal year 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, collection kits, chemicals, storage and Rapid DNA technology.
DNA backlogs at the FBI are hardly new. A Justice Department inspector general audit found that the bureau once cut a separate convicted-offender, arrestee and detainee backlog from more than 312,000 samples in December 2009 to a normal monthly workload of about 14,000 by May 2011. Automation, new hires and high-throughput robotics did much of that work.
The numbers then got away from the bureau all over again. Patel says his team has dragged the pending count back to zero and thanked the FBI Lab Division for getting it done.
Those swabs were collected so detectives could search them, not so the FBI could store them. Now they can
Editor’s Note: The American people overwhelmingly support President Trump’s law and order agenda.
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