'Getting out of the terrorism business': Experts warn Trump is ending extremism fight

On a frigid winter morning in 2022, a stranger knocked on the door of a synagogue in Colleyville, Texas, during Shabbat service.

Soon after he was invited in for tea, the visitor pulled out a pistol and demanded the release of an al-Qaida-linked detainee from a nearby federal prison, seizing as hostages a rabbi and three worshipers. The standoff lasted 10 hours until the rabbi, drawing on extensive security training, hurled a chair at the assailant. The hostages escaped.

“We are alive today because of that education,” Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker said after the attack.

The averted tragedy at Congregation Beth Israel is cited as a success story for the largely unseen prevention work federal authorities have relied on for years in the fight to stop terrorist attacks and mass shootings. The government weaves together partnerships with academic researchers and community groups across the country as part of a strategy for addressing violent extremism as a public health concern.

A specialized intervention team at Boston Children’s Hospital treats young patients — some referred by the FBI — who show signs of disturbing, violent behavior. Eradicate Hate, a national prevention umbrella group, says one of its trainees helped thwart a school shooting in California last year by reporting a gun in a fellow student’s backpack. In other programs, counselors guide neo-Nazis out of the white-power movement or help families of Islamist extremists undo the effects of violent propaganda.

The throughline for this work is federal funding — a reliance on grants that are rapidly disappearing as the Trump administration guts billions in spending.

Tens of millions of dollars slated for violence prevention have been cut or are frozen pending review as President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency steamrolls the national security sector. Barring action from Congress or the courts, counterterrorism professionals say, the White House appears poised to end the government’s backing of prevention work on urgent threats.

“This is the government getting out of the terrorism business,” said one federal grant recipient who was ordered this week to cease work on projects including a database used by law enforcement agencies to assess threats.

This account is drawn from interviews with nearly two dozen current and former national security personnel, federally funded researchers and nonprofit grant recipients. Except in a few cases, they spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation from the Trump administration.

Dozens of academic and nonprofit programs that rely on grants from the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department and other agencies are in crisis mode, mirroring the uncertainty of other parts of the government amid Trump’s seismic reorganization.

“We’re on a precipice,” said the leader of a large nonprofit that has received multiple federal grants and worked with Democratic and Republican administrations on prevention campaigns.

Program leaders describe a chilling new operating environment. Scholars of white supremacist violence — which the FBI for years has described as a main driver of domestic terrorism — wonder how they’ll be able to continue tracking the threat without running afoul of the administration’s ban on terms related to race and racism.

The training the rabbi credits with saving his Texas synagogue in 2022 came from a broader community initiative whose federal funding is in limbo. One imperiled effort, FEMA’s Nonprofit Security Grant Program, has helped Jewish institutions across the country install security cameras, train staff and add protective barriers, according to the nonprofit Secure Community Network, which gives security advice and monitors threats to Jewish communities nationwide.

In July 2023, access-control doors acquired through the grant program prevented a gunman from entering Margolin Hebrew Academy in Memphis. In 2021, when gunfire struck the Jewish Family Service offices in Denver, grant-funded protective window film stopped bullets from penetrating the building.

“These are not hypothetical scenarios, they are real examples of how NSGP funds prevent injuries and deaths,” Michael Masters, director of the Secure Community Network, wrote this month in an op-ed in The Jerusalem Post calling for continued funding of the program.

Now the security grants program has been shelved as authorities and Jewish groups warn of rising antisemitism. The generous reading, one Jewish program leader said, is that the funds were inadvertently swept up in DOGE cuts. Trump has been a vocal supporter of Jewish groups and, as one of his first acts in office, signed an executive order promising to tackle antisemitism.

Still, the freeze on grants for synagogue protections has revived talk of finding new, more independent funding streams.

Throughout Jewish history, the program director said, “we’ve learned you need a Plan B.”

The White House did not respond to requests for comment.

“Tsunami” of Cuts

For more than two decades, the federal government has invested tens of millions of dollars in prevention work and academic research with the goal of intervening in the crucial window known as “left of boom” — before an attack occurs.

The projects are diffuse, spread across several agencies, but the government’s central clearinghouse is at Homeland Security in the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships, often called CP3. The office houses a grant program that since 2020 has awarded nearly $90 million to community groups and law enforcement agencies working at the local level to prevent terrorism and targeted violence such as mass shootings.

These days, CP3 is imploding. Nearly 20% of its workforce was cut through the dismissal of probationary employees March 3. CP3 Director Bill Braniff, an Army veteran who had fiercely defended the office’s achievements in LinkedIn posts in recent weeks, resigned the same night.

“It is a small act of quiet protest, and an act of immense respect I have for them and for our team,” Braniff wrote in a departing message to staff that was obtained by ProPublica. In the note, he called the employees “wrongfully terminated.”

Some of this year’s CP3 grant recipients say they have no idea whether their funding will continue. One awardee said the team is looking at nightmare scenarios of laying off staff and paring operations to the bone.

“Everybody’s trying to survive,” the grantee said. “It feels like this is a tsunami and you don’t know how it’s going to hit you.”

Current and former DHS officials say they don’t expect the prevention mission to continue in any meaningful way, signaling the end to an effort that had endured through early missteps and criticism from the left and right.

The prevention mission evolved from the post-9/11 growth of a field known as countering violent extremism, or CVE. In early CVE efforts, serious scholars of militant movements jostled for funding alongside pseudo-scientists claiming to have discovered predictors of radicalization. CVE results typically weren’t measurable, allowing for inflated promises of success — “snake oil,” as one researcher put it.

Worse, some CVE programs billed as community partnerships to prevent extremism backfired and led to mistrust that persists today. Muslim advocacy groups were incensed by the government’s targeting of their communities for deradicalization programs, blaming CVE for stigmatizing law-abiding families and contributing to anti-Muslim hostility. Among the most influential Muslim advocacy groups, it is still taboo to accept funding from Homeland Security.

Defenders of CP3, which launched in 2021 from an earlier incarnation, insist that the old tactics based on profiling are gone. They also say there are now more stringent metrics to gauge effectiveness. CP3’s 2024 report to Congress listed more than 1,000 interventions since 2020, cases where prevention workers stepped in with services to dissuade individuals from violence.

The probationary employees who were dismissed this month represented the future of CP3’s public health approach to curbing violence, say current and former DHS officials. They were terminated by email in boilerplate language about poor performance, a detail that infuriated colleagues who viewed them as accomplished social workers and public health professionals.

There were no consultations with administration officials or DOGE — just the ax, said one DHS source with knowledge of the CP3 cuts. Promised exemptions for national security personnel apparently didn’t apply as Trump’s Homeland Security agenda shrinks to a single issue.

“The vibe is: How to use DHS to go after migrants, immigrants. That is the vibe, that is the only vibe, there is no other vibe,” the source said. “It’s wild — it’s as if the rest of the department doesn’t exist.”

This week, with scant warning, Homeland Security cut around $20 million for more than two dozen programs from another wing of DHS, including efforts aimed at stopping terrorist attacks and school shooters.

A Homeland Security spokesperson confirmed “sweeping cuts and reforms” aimed at eliminating waste but did not address questions about specific programs. DHS “remains focused on supporting law enforcement and public safety through funding, training, increased public awareness, and partnerships,” the statement said.

One grant recipient said they were told by a Homeland Security liaison that targeted programs were located in places named on a Fox News list of “sanctuary states” that have resisted or refused cooperation with the government’s deportation campaign. The grantee’s project was given less than an hour to submit outstanding expenses before the shutdown.

The orders were so sudden that even some officials within the government had trouble coming up with language to justify the termination notices. They said they were given no explanation for how the targeted programs were in violation of the president’s executive orders.

“I just don’t believe this is in any way legal,” said one official with knowledge of the cuts.

Threat Research in Limbo

Cuts are reshaping government across the board, but perhaps nowhere more jarringly than in the counterterrorism apparatus. The administration started dismantling it when the president granted clemency to nearly 1,600 defendants charged in connection with the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

The pardons overturned what the Justice Department had celebrated as a watershed victory in the fight against domestic terrorism.

Senior FBI officials with terrorism expertise have left or are being forced out in the purge of personnel involved in the Jan. 6 investigation. In other cases, agents working terrorism cases have been moved to Homeland Security to help with Trump’s mass deportation effort, a resource shift that runs counter to the government’s own threat assessments showing homegrown militants as the more urgent priority. The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment.

Without research backing up the enforcement arm of counterterrorism, analysts and officials say, the government lacks the capacity to evaluate rapidly evolving homegrown threats.

Researchers are getting whiplash as grant dollars are frozen and unfrozen. Even if they win temporary relief, the prospect of getting new federal funding in the next four years is minimal. They described pressure to self-censor or tailor research narrowly to MAGA interests in far-left extremism and Islamist militants.

“What happens when you’re self-silencing? What happens if people just stop thinking they should propose something because it’s ‘too risky?’” said one extremism scholar who has advised senior officials and received federal funding. “A lot of ideas that could be used to prevent all kinds of social harms, including terrorism, could get tossed.”

Among the projects at risk is a national compilation of threats to public officials, including assassination attempts against Trump; research on the violent misogyny that floods social media platforms; a long-term study of far-right extremists who are attempting to disengage from hate movements. The studies are underway at research centers and university labs that, in some cases, are funded almost entirely by Homeland Security. A stop-work order could disrupt sensitive projects midstream or remove findings from public view.

“There are both national security and public safety implications for not continuing to study these very complicated problems,” said Pete Simi, a criminologist at Chapman University in California who has federally funded projects that could be cut.

One project never got off the ground before work was suspended.

Six months ago, the National Institute of Justice, the research arm of the Justice Department, announced the Domestic Radicalization and Violent Extremism Research Center of Excellence as a new hub for “understanding the phenomenon” of extremist violence.

Work was scheduled to start in January. The website has since disappeared and the future of the center is in limbo.

Other prevention initiatives in jeopardy at the Justice Department include grant programs related to hate crimes training, which has been in demand with recent unrest on college campuses. In the first weeks of the Trump administration, grant recipients heard a freeze was coming and rushed to withdraw remaining funds. Grant officers suggested work should cease, too, until directives come from the new leadership.

Anne Speckhard, a researcher who has interviewed dozens of militants and works closely with federal counterterrorism agencies, pushed back. She had around 200 people signed up for a training that was scheduled for days after the first funding freeze. Slides for the presentation had been approved, but Speckhard said she wasn’t getting clear answers from the grant office about how to proceed. She decided to go for it.

“I think the expected response was, ‘You’ll just stop working, and you’ll wait and see,’ and that’s not me,” said Speckhard, whose International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism receives U.S. funding along with backing from Qatar and private donations.

As the virtual training began, Speckhard and her team addressed the murkiness of the Justice Department’s support in a moment that drew laughter from the crowd of law enforcement officers and university administrators.

“We said, ‘We think this is a DOJ-sponsored training, and we want to thank them for their sponsorship,’” Speckhard said. “‘But we’re not sure.’”