Trump gutted key research programs studying violence. Experts say it will come at a heavy cost

Since Donald Trump took office in January, several federal programs and research institutions aimed at preventing gun violence, sexual violence, domestic terrorist attacks and violent hate crimes have been shuttered or downsized. These cuts, advocates say, will disrupt – or even end – critical research and will ultimately lead to an increase in violence of all forms.

“It’s simple: we will see more school and workplace violence, more hate-fueled violence and terrorism and our political leadership will see more assassination attempts. This is the government putting itself at risk. There is no rung of society that is immune to violence like this,” said William Braniff, former director of the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships (CP3) at the Department of Homeland Security, about the increase in violence threats against government officials and judges.

Through CP3, Braniff and his staff had been working with local law enforcement, schools and nonprofits to prevent threats and attacks aimed at specific groups and locations. But on 3 March, 20% of Braniff’s staff was terminated during a round of “department of government efficiency” (Doge) cuts, and he resigned alongside them. After a judge’s order, the staff members were reinstated but are currently on administrative leave.

In addition to DHS, violence prevention efforts were slashed as a result of cuts to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“There’s going to be a huge impact on [our ability to make] communities safer from violence in schools at home and on the streets,” said James Mercy, former director of the CDC’s division of violence prevention. “I think it’s a real step back. This undermining of science reflects a belief that science can’t help us understand and solve these problems.”

Mercy spent 41 years at the CDC, and in the 1980s was one of just a handful of researchers there investigating the ways violence impacts public health. Since then, he’s helped build the division into one of the nation’s leading hubs of data and analysis on child abuse, sexual and domestic violence, and firearm injuries. On Tuesday, about 2,400 people were laid off at the CDC. Mercy said this included the majority of the division’s staff.

Mercy, who left his role in 2023, says that throughout his tenure at the CDC, his work has generally had bipartisan support. While he’s seen funding and staffing cuts before, they’ve been “nowhere near” the level they are now, he said. Before this round of cuts, he says the group had started to evaluate which strategies work best to curtail gun violence – but this work is now in jeopardy.

“Our overall goal was to support communities in preventing violence. That work will slow,” Mercy said.

The cuts to the CDC’s violence prevention team come amid tens of thousands of layoffs across US health agencies and follow the removal of a HHS webpage that frames gun violence as a public health crisis. On Wednesday, attorneys general and officials from 23 states announced a lawsuit against the Trump administration over the downsizing of public health agencies. The lawsuit, filed in a Rhode Island district court, argues that the $11bn in cuts “immediately triggered chaos for state and local health jurisdictions”.

At DHS, Braniff said CP3 had been working to widen the department’s concept of terror to include “grievance based” violence, which are usually pre-meditated acts based on personal resentments like being fired from a job, and being rejected by peers or a romantic partner.

Braniff was also working with local law enforcement to understand what drives people to make threats of and commit mass shootings and other terror so that they can find ways to intervene before anyone is harmed.

“We looked at it through the lens of violence prevention and saw there were strategies we could tailor to this kind of violence,” said Braniff, who has since moved to a new role with the Polarization and Extremism Research & Innovation Lab (PERIL) at American University in Washington DC. “We got more traction in that last 12 months than anyone could anticipate from law enforcement agencies who said, ‘someone is finally bringing us help.’”

Another program that has been canceled is Terrorism and Targeted Violence (T2V), which receives funding from DHS and maintains a database of domestic terror attacks and the types of weapons used in them. This move is being appealed by the University of Maryland, where T2V is housed.

“Our goal was to try to prevent violence and terrorism and treat it like any other sort of phenomenon that science was interested in,” said Gary LaFree, the co-principal investigator on the project.

On 17 March, LaFree was notified via email that T2V was cancelled and that he and his staff of about six part-time workers would be laid off. Before they were cut, LaFree and his staff had collected data on terrorism and targeted violent crimes in 2023 and 2024. They found that more than 1,800 such events have occurred in the US, killing more than 400 people and injuring 700 more.

Without this type of research, he says, the federal government’s policies and counterterrorism efforts will be based on anecdotes and conjecture instead of up-to-date data. “How can you come up with a policy on anything without data?” he said. “You’re just making it up otherwise. You’ve just got people’s hunches and guesses.”

Another DHS project that assembled school leadership, campus safety experts and parents of children killed in school shootings to develop recommendations on the ways schools respond to and prevent shootings has also been taken offline. The federal school safety clearinghouse external advisory board was announced by DHS last July and the board met once in October. Days after Trump’s inauguration, DHS told the group that the clearinghouse was being disbanded. Members were invited to reapply for their positions – but it’s unclear if the effort will ever restart, two members told the Guardian.

DHS did not respond to the Guardian’s questions about whether the clearinghouse would resume and why T2V and CP3 ended.

“It felt like a gut punch and has been tough to watch because I know how much work has gone into creating some of these agencies,” said Michael Bennett, the superintendent at Greenville Central school district in New York. In 2004, when Bennett was a high school teacher, he was shot by a 16-year-old student. In the years since, Bennett has worked with survivors and school leaders to restore their communities after shootings, including several people involved with the clearinghouse.

Federal cooperation is essential to this work, he says. School officials get an understanding of nationwide data and trends, and agencies such as DHS get input from people who’ve been injured and lost their children on how to respond to attacks.

“We were beginning to make inroads to show why it’s important to work arm in arm and point to data. And we’ve lost some of that,” Bennett said. “We’ll continue to beat the drum, but tracking it is hard enough and it will be even harder to do it across state lines.”