Trump’s counter-terror cuts will harm fight against far right, experts warn

Donald Trump’s administration has ended funding for a slew of counter-terrorism research projects, in a move experts say will hinder future law enforcement abilities to predict and prevent attacks on the public, especially from the far right.

The cuts, affecting multiple agencies and departments, come after the US president granted “unconditional” pardons to about 1,500 people involved in the January 6 attacks on Capitol Hill and the appointment of the Trump ultra-loyalist Kash Patel to the helm of the FBI.

The National Institute of Justice has now scuppered its research into improving the “understanding of radicalization to violent extremism” in local communities. The Department of Defense has also followed up the recent deletion of its social sciences-focused Minerva program by culling $30m in annual funding for academic studies focusing on extremism, disinformation and other subjects.

Then, last week, the University of Maryland announced that its invaluable dataset tracking hate crimes, antisemitism, domestic terrorist attacks and school shootings was also being defunded by the Department of Homeland Security.

So far, the broader academic counter-terrorism and national security community has been voicing its shock at the vast scale of cuts as this reimagining of counter-terrorism strategies undermines Trump’s own promises of ending stateside terrorism.

“NIJ, Minerva, and now DHS. Terrorism research portfolios gone,” wrote John Horgan, a professor at Georgia State University who worked with DHS, in a LinkedIn post. “Just wiped out.”

Horgan continued: “Years of progress, years of partnerships, years of producing actionable knowledge to make communities safer just down the toilet.”

In response to Horgan, one of DHS’s own social scientists at its Science and Technology directorate offered his condolences and confirmed the benefits of scholars’ research that had helped the government in “advancing our understanding of human behavior and psychology as it impacts terrorism and targeted violence”.

The same DHS employee directed the Guardian to his agency’s media department for a statement, which did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Michael Jensen, research director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (Start), the entity that housed the dataset at the University of Maryland, released an official statement calling out the DHS defunding.

“As I understand it, our project was one of many terrorism and targeted violence research grants terminated by DHS,” said Jensen. “The impact of these cancellations on the terrorism research field, the development of the next generation of homeland security professionals, and, ultimately, public safety will be felt for years.”

In recent years, the Start research was also a key player in keeping track of rising incidents of antisemitism, which Trump has used as a pretext to arrest student activists and which he claims he will bring to a swift end.

Heidi Beirich, co-founder of non-profit watchdog the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, pointed out that the present moment reminded her of the early years of the Obama administration – when domestic terrorism threats from the far right and other actors were ignored.

“Without this research, we won’t know the extent of the problems we face when it comes to domestic terrorism, nor how to mitigate them,” said Beirich. “And it will leave a huge hole in our knowledge base going forward – one that recent work and attention was trying to address. We will all suffer for the loss of this work.”

On-the-ground policing has also sharply pivoted since Trump reassumed the presidency. Multiple sources familiar with FBI investigations into domestic terrorism say the agency is reassigning agents to focus on Latin American street gangs, border taskforces and leftwing radical groups, rather than the far right. Publicly, for example, the attorney general, Pam Bondi, has promised counter-terrorism resources to combat the vandalism of Tesla cars and dealerships.

Beirich called the FBI reallocating its resources from domestic terrorism cases and deliberate neglect of the far right a “disgrace” and an unforced error in the making.

“The crackdown after January 6 definitely had a dampening effect on the activities of the far right and especially their ability to commit violence,” she said. “Now they will be back, and given this is the No 1 source of domestic terrorism, people will likely pay for these changes with their lives.”

Adam Hadley, the founder and executive director of Tech Against Terrorism, said that while he had mixed feelings about the broader “counter-terrorism industrial complex” being defunded, he thinks governmental and external sector reductions in counter-terrorism research could have a dangerous effect in the current moment – especially, he said, when Silicon Valley companies care less about moderating extremist content and are major allies of the White House.

“At the same time, major tech platforms pay millions of pounds per year in PR fees to whitewash their increasingly lax standards for terrorist content removal,” said Hadley. “These major platforms have now become the biggest source of terrorist content online.”

According to him, the platforms have done “the bare minimum to remove terrorist material published by IS, al-Qaida, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and violent neo-Nazis”, which increases the chances of young people being radicalized from it online.