The FBI has revised its hiring standards and no longer disqualifies applicants who admitted to hiring prostitutes or stealing from an employer. The new guidelines come following the retirement, resignation and termination of scores of FBI…
Page B4From§Eachthe supper edition — 30 August 2026
FBI revises hiring rules on theft and prostitution as Google renames a lake at the president's request.
As it ran on the front
Died this week, quietly and without a funeral notice: the presumption that a federal law enforcement agency's hiring bar and a mapping company's naming convention sat outside the reach of a political request.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation's internal standard regarding applicants with histories of prostitution or theft from an employer was revised, per the agency's own account, this week. Separately, and unrelated on paper, Google's maps swapped the label on Lake Ontario to read "Lake America," following an executive order on renaming. Neither institution called it a concession. Both institutions did the thing anyway.…
…(cont) The old hiring standard is survived by a personnel office that will, presumably, keep filling out the paperwork regardless of what boxes are checked. It is preceded in death by a long line of internal FBI conduct rules quietly adjusted over the decades, none of which got an obituary either, because nobody writes one for a memo.
The lake's old name is survived by every atlas printed before this week, by the province of Ontario, and by cartographers who will now spend a working afternoon explaining to a customer service line why a Great Lake has a new label. It is preceded in death by nothing in particular; lakes do not usually have their names changed by a technology company on a Tuesday. This one did.
Whippersnappers in the newsroom keep asking why this is a story and not just an update. It is a story because standards are supposed to be the boring part of an institution, the part that does not move when the wind changes. When the boring part moves, that is the whole news. This is not a conspiracy; nobody is hiding the memo, the FBI put the change in writing itself, and Google's map update has a name attached to the order that caused it. It is just, plain, malarkey to call either one routine.
An institution's standards are not supposed to be a shit deal that renegotiates itself depending on who is asking. That is the one fact this obituary carries, and it is enough.
In lieu of flowers, the family asks that agencies publish, in writing, every time a standard changes and who asked for the change.
“An FBI standard and a lake's name don't seem related until you notice both of them just moved because somebody with power asked. That's not a coincidence, that's the whole business model.”
“The Bureau adjusted its criteria to reflect a broader hiring pool, full stop. As for the map — that's a private company's decision, nothing to do with — well, it says right there it's following the order, so. It's their call.”
The receipts
The company made the same change to the Gulf of Mexico last year.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.