Biden's FBI spent years building a surveillance monster.
Documents just exposed the program Trump inherited.
And FBI bureaucrats just defied Trump with one surveillance power grab that threatens every conservative in America.
Biden-Era FBI Program Surfaces After Election
A Biden-era FBI procurement request for AI-powered surveillance drones just became public last week — and it reveals exactly what Trump is up against in his battle to clean house at the Bureau.
Career FBI bureaucrats initiated the vendor call for drones equipped with facial recognition, license plate readers, and weapon detection systems during Biden's final months in office.
The request for information represents the first step before awarding contracts that would lock in surveillance capabilities for years.
"It's essentially technology tailor-made for political retribution and harassment," Matthew Guariglia, a policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, warned.¹
Trump inherited this surveillance infrastructure when he took office in January 2025.
Director Kash Patel has been systematically rooting out the woke agents and Obama holdovers who weaponized the Bureau against conservatives.
He recently fired approximately 20 agents who knelt during 2020 BLM riots.²
But thousands of career bureaucrats remain embedded throughout the FBI, many hired during the Obama years and protected by civil service rules.
These permanent government employees spent the Biden years building facial recognition systems and planning drone deployments they knew would target Trump supporters.
Now Trump and Patel face a critical decision about whether to kill this program or let it proceed.
Obama-Biden FBI Built Surveillance Machine Over Decades
The FBI's leadership spent years developing facial recognition capabilities through a secretive program funded by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity.
Documents show FBI scientists created software that identifies faces from "truly unconstrained" imagery captured by drones and security cameras.³
The system recognizes faces from over half a kilometer away.
The Deep State started building this technology under Obama and accelerated it under Biden.
The Bureau's track record proves exactly who this technology targets.
The Obama-Biden FBI operated surveillance flights over Baltimore in 2015, retaining more than 18 hours of video tracking individual protesters.⁴
When Trump supporters gathered on January 6, the FBI's facial recognition systems went into overdrive.
But when Antifa terrorists firebombed federal buildings in Portland for months during 2020, those same systems somehow couldn't identify anyone.
Career bureaucrats at DHS deployed drones to 15 cities during the George Floyd riots — not to stop the violence, but to test surveillance capabilities on massive crowds.⁵
These are battlefield weapons turned on American citizens.
Career FBI officials spent decades building facial recognition databases and testing drone surveillance systems.
Under Biden, they monitored parents at school board meetings, infiltrated Catholic churches, and labeled concerned moms as domestic terrorists.
The procurement request that just became public represents the final piece — getting contracts awarded and technology deployed before Trump could stop them.
Trump Faces Uphill Battle Against Entrenched Surveillance State
President Trump took aggressive action against genuine threats the moment he returned to office.
His national security team issued guidance making it clear that real domestic terrorism — the kind that killed Charlie Kirk — will face severe consequences.
Attorney General Pam Bondi directed prosecutors to treat actual violence, doxing, and rioting as the serious crimes they are.
But Trump and Patel inherited a surveillance infrastructure Biden's FBI spent four years building.
Career bureaucrats deliberately structured programs to survive administration changes.
They embedded facial recognition systems throughout federal law enforcement.
They initiated procurement requests in Biden's final months that would take months to unwind.
They locked in contracts before Trump's team could review them.
"One of our biggest fears has been that police will fly a face recognition drone over a protest and in a few passes have a list of everyone who attended," Guariglia explained.⁶
That's exactly what Biden's FBI wanted.
A permanent record of every Trump supporter who attends a rally.
A database of every parent who speaks at a school board meeting.
Facial scans of everyone at a Second Amendment rights gathering.
The technology doesn't work well enough to catch actual criminals.
School districts wasted millions on AI weapons detection systems riddled with problems and false alerts.
But the technology works perfectly for building lists of law-abiding conservatives.
Approximately 1,500 law enforcement agencies already operate drone programs with minimal oversight — most of them in Democrat-run cities.
The Biden-era FBI procurement request provides no safeguards to protect Trump supporters' constitutional rights.
That's deliberate.
What This Means For Trump's Second Term
Director Patel is fighting an uphill battle against a surveillance state Biden built specifically to target conservatives.
He's fired the most obvious bad actors.
But thousands of career bureaucrats remain embedded throughout the FBI, many hired during the Obama years and protected by civil service rules.
These are the same people who spied on Trump's 2016 campaign, pushed the Russia collusion hoax, raided Mar-a-Lago, targeted parents as domestic terrorists, and let Hunter Biden's crimes slide for years.
Biden gave them four years to build the infrastructure they'll use against Trump supporters.
Every Trump rally becomes a facial recognition database, every conservative protest gets catalogued, and every parent speaking out gets their face scanned and stored.
And when Democrats inevitably retake power — whether in two years or six — they'll inherit a fully operational surveillance system Biden built specifically to target conservatives.
Trump has the authority to kill this program.
He can direct Patel to cancel the procurement request and dismantle the surveillance infrastructure Biden built.
But that requires identifying every contract, every system, every database Biden's team embedded throughout the FBI.
The Deep State counted on Trump not having enough time or resources to root out everything they built.
They structured programs to survive administration changes precisely because they knew Trump would win in 2024.
The question is whether Trump and Patel can dismantle Biden's surveillance monster before it goes fully operational.
Because once those drones are in the air with facial recognition enabled, there's no putting that genie back in the bottle.
This is the reality Trump inherited from Biden's FBI.
Career bureaucrats who spent four years building tools to destroy the America First movement.
And Trump has four years to tear it all down before Democrats get another chance to use it.
¹ Noah Hurowitz, "The FBI Wants AI Surveillance Drones With Facial Recognition," The Intercept, November 21, 2025.
² "FBI fires agents photographed kneeling during 2020 George Floyd protests," The Washington Post, September 27, 2025.
³ "FBI & Pentagon Officials Developed 'Truly Unconstrained' Facial Recognition," Information Security Buzz, March 8, 2023.
⁴ "FBI Releases Secret Spy Plane Footage From Freddie Gray Protests," American Civil Liberties Union, February 27, 2023.
⁵ "After George Floyd's murder, police built a secretive surveillance machine that lives on," MIT Technology Review, September 14, 2023.
⁶ Noah Hurowitz, "The FBI Wants AI Surveillance Drones With Facial Recognition," The Intercept, November 21, 2025.
