Federal Bureau of Investigation

Overview

The Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) has nearly 32,000 employees, including 13,000 special agents and an operating budget of $7.3 billion in 2009, the biggest in the Justice Department.

Its headquarters is in Washington D.C., but the FBI has 56 field offices and more than 400 branches throughout the U.S., as well as 60 international offices. The scope of FBI investigations is enormously large, but the bureau's general priorities are national security investigations, which include counter-terrorism, counter-intelligence and cyber-crime, and criminal investigations such as public corruption, white-collar crime, organized crime, civil rights and violent crime.