The FBI Covers New Hampshire From Bedford and Hampton. Who Checks the Bureau Behind Them?

Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

The bureau is asking Congress for nearly 1,300 more agents. In the same budget, the inspector general who audits it faces a 28 percent cut.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation covers New Hampshire from two offices. One is in Bedford and answers for Belknap, Cheshire, Grafton, Hillsborough, Merrimack, and Sullivan counties. The other is in Hampton and answers for Carroll, Coos, Rockingham, and Strafford. Both report to the bureau’s Boston Division, which sits in Chelsea, Massachusetts, covers four states, and is run by Special Agent in Charge Ted E. Docks.

New Hampshire has no FBI field office of its own. What it has is a share of someone else’s. This report, the second in a GSR series that takes law enforcement one agency at a time, sets out what the bureau is allowed to do, how big it is, what it does here, and who is supposed to catch it when it gets something wrong. The sources are the bureau’s budget filings, federal statute, the director’s testimony, and the Justice Department’s inspector general.

The short version: the FBI is a police force and an intelligence service under one name, and it also runs national record systems, including the background-check system behind gun sales. It is asking Congress for nearly 1,300 more agents. In the same budget, the office that audits it is slated to lose more than a quarter of its money.

Related coverage. The first report in this series, GSR’s profile of the DEA, covers the drug agency’s powers, budget, and Londonderry laboratory; its staffing and budget figures are the DEA’s own and are not comparable to the FBI figures here. GSR’s “No Evidence Required” examines how federal agencies demand records without a judge, which this report only mentions. GSR’s profile of the ATF covers gun tracing and dealer inspections.

Where it came from

The bureau dates itself to July 26, 1908, when Attorney General Charles J. Bonaparte ordered Justice Department lawyers to send most investigative work to a new in-house force. It had 34 agents: nine former Secret Service investigators and 25 of Bonaparte’s own. It got its first name, the Bureau of Investigation, on March 16, 1909.

The legal footing is short. 28 U.S.C. § 533 lets the Attorney General appoint officials to detect and prosecute crimes against the United States. The bureau’s authority to investigate rests on that provision and on the Attorney General’s direction.

How big it is now

The fiscal 2027 request asks Congress for $12.53 billion, which the Justice Department describes as 17.8 percent above the enacted fiscal 2026 level. It would pay for 37,702 positions: 14,190 special agents, 3,016 intelligence analysts, and 20,496 professional staff. The bureau operates 56 field offices, about 350 smaller resident agencies like the two in New Hampshire, and 63 legal attaché offices in 84 countries.

The request follows two years of shrinkage. The same budget summary shows 35,967 positions and 13,445 special agents in fiscal 2024, and 34,442 positions and 12,902 agents in fiscal 2026. The 2027 request would add about 3,200 positions, nearly 1,300 of them agents.

Director Kash Patel’s statement shows where the new money would go. It asks for $311.7 million and 686 positions for violent crime, $166.1 million and 328 positions for counterterrorism, $95.6 million and 152 positions for cyber work, and $73.2 million and 154 positions for counterintelligence.

Patel, the bureau’s director, carried the request to a Senate appropriations subcommittee on May 12, 2026. His written statement also says the bureau has moved 604 special agents out of the Washington area and into field offices since January 2025. It does not say where they went.

What an agent can do

Those powers no longer stop at the bureau’s own payroll. Patel told senators that on April 9, 2026, the FBI gained direct authority to deputize state and local officers, and to cross-designate other federal officers, to use federal criminal powers on FBI-led task forces. GSR has not located the document that grants it.

New Hampshire already has the structure that authority feeds. Federal prosecutors here describe a Homeland Security Task Force New Hampshire made up of agents and officers from the FBI, Homeland Security Investigations, the IRS, the DEA, the ATF, the U.S. Marshals Service, and the Diplomatic Security Service. Nationally, Patel’s statement counts 59 such task forces with more than 9,000 federal agents, task force officers, and analysts.

One case shows what that looks like on the ground. Prosecutors say guns bought in New Hampshire were moved through the Akwesasne Mohawk reservation into Canada, about 51 firearms in all, at least ten of them later recovered at Canadian crime scenes. The ATF and Homeland Security Investigations led that investigation under the task force banner, and the Manchester and Keene police departments were among the agencies that assisted. Four more defendants pleaded guilty in the weeks before October 9, 2026.

The half nobody films

The FBI is also an intelligence agency, and the sharpest fight over that half is happening now. Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act lets the government collect the communications of foreigners abroad. Americans’ messages get swept in, and the FBI can search what was collected without a warrant, Roll Call reported.

On June 5, 2026, the Senate voted 47 to 52 against taking up a long-term renewal. The statute lapsed at midnight on June 12, 2026. The collection did not stop with it. According to a Fox News report published November 13, 2026, the Attorney General, the Director of National Intelligence, and the CIA director told congressional leaders in a letter that collection under the existing authority runs until March 16, 2027, and asked for a renewal.

The other quiet half is record-keeping. The FBI operates the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, the system a licensed gun dealer uses to check whether a buyer may legally have a firearm. The bureau’s own state-by-state file shows 133,973 checks initiated for New Hampshire in 2025, down from a peak of 174,662 in 2020 and up from 37,711 in 1999. The file lists 118,446 for the first ten months of 2026. The FBI’s note on the file says the numbers count checks and do not represent the number of firearms sold.

The FBI in New Hampshire

The Boston Division’s own page is the best public map of the bureau here: Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island under one special agent in charge, with the Bedford and Hampton offices splitting New Hampshire’s ten counties.

What those offices do shows up in court. In a drug conspiracy case that produced a guilty plea in May 2026, a federal announcement credited the FBI Major Offender Task Force with leading the investigation and the DEA, the Strafford County Sheriff’s Office, and the Boston Police Department with assisting. The case went through U.S. District Court in New Hampshire.

The bureau’s own scorecard is harder to read from here. On October 9, 2026, FBI Boston announced the results of a summer violent-crime push: 176 arrests across its four states, almost 50 kilos of drugs seized, 69 weapons recovered, and 44 children identified or located. Docks said “the real impact is measured in safer neighborhoods.”

The release then lists highlights from western Massachusetts, the North Shore, Rhode Island, and Maine. New Hampshire appears once, as a destination: the release says alleged members of the Trinitarios, charged in a racketeering case, trafficked fentanyl, cocaine, and methamphetamine to New Hampshire and Maine. The release gives no New Hampshire arrest count.

The national scorecard has its own tension. Patel told senators the FBI made 34,000 violent crime arrests in 2025, which he called a 112 percent increase over 2024. The Boston release says the country’s violent crime rate fell 9 percent in 2025. Arrests more than doubled in a year when, by the bureau’s own count, violent crime fell. Both figures are the FBI’s.

Who checks it

On paper, the chain is short. The director answers to the Attorney General. Congress controls the money and, as the Section 702 vote showed, can let a surveillance law die. Federal judges rule on the cases agents bring. The Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General audits the rest.

The inspector general has been busy with the bureau this year. A March 2026 audit of the FBI’s information security program found weaknesses in 4 of the 10 areas it tests under the federal information security law, made 12 recommendations, and noted that problems behind three earlier recommendations were still open. The FBI agreed with the findings.

A September 2026 audit looked at a construction contract worth about $229 million for an FBI building in Huntsville, Alabama. The project was declared substantially complete in January 2025, 17 months after its scheduled date. The auditors found the bureau had not prepared a separate independent cost estimate for the contract and had not checked whether the builder was doing the share of the work the contract required until the auditors asked. The FBI concurred with all three recommendations.

Now read the inspector general’s own line in the fiscal 2027 budget. The request cuts the office from $149.0 million to $107.5 million, a drop the document puts at 27.8 percent, and from 560 positions to 403. Its single program change is labeled an audit, investigations, and inspections reduction: $38.6 million and 141 positions. The document says the office “will mitigate impacts through attrition.” It operates audit and investigations field offices in 15 cities.

Put the two requests side by side. By the department’s figures, the agency being audited would grow by 17.8 percent and the office doing the auditing would shrink by 27.8 percent. Both numbers come from the same department, in the same budget, for the same year.

What the record does not show

The paper behind this report has holes, and they are mostly New Hampshire-shaped. In the documents reviewed, GSR found no public count of FBI agents, analysts, or task force officers assigned to the Bedford and Hampton offices. The Boston Division’s results are reported for four states at once. Patel’s statement says 604 agents moved to the field and does not say whether any came here.

The local side is thinner still. Nothing in the public filings says which New Hampshire police departments have officers on FBI task forces, whether any have been deputized under the April 2026 authority, or what written agreements govern them.

Those questions have answers, and the answers are on file. The federal side is a matter for the Freedom of Information Act. The state and local side is a matter for RSA 91-A, the Right-to-Know Law, which gives every person the same right to ask.

The FBI in New Hampshire is two addresses and a chain of command that runs through Chelsea, Massachusetts, to Washington. It can arrest on reasonable grounds, lend its powers to local officers, and it runs the system behind more than 130,000 New Hampshire gun checks a year. The office built to watch all of that is the one in this story whose budget goes down.

Fact check

Editor’s note. Every factual claim above was checked against the sources listed; see the fact-check table. Fiscal 2027 figures are requests to Congress, not enacted appropriations. Case descriptions are the government’s accounts; defendants who have not pleaded guilty are presumed innocent. GSR did not ask the FBI for comment before publication; the audit findings are the inspector general’s, and the bureau’s agreement with them is reported above. The audio narration is a synthetic voice. Corrections: Granite State Report corrects verified errors promptly and appends a note identifying what changed and when.