His career blastoff came quickly. A year after graduation, the 22-year-old with no apparent national security expertise is now a Department of Homeland Security official overseeing the government’s main hub for terrorism prevention, including an $18 million grant program intended to help communities combat violent extremism.

The White House appointed Fugate, a former Trump campaign worker who interned at the hard-right Heritage Foundation, to a Homeland Security role that was expanded to include the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships. Known as CP3, the office has led nationwide efforts to prevent hate-fueled attacks, school shootings and other forms of targeted violence.

Fugate’s appointment is the latest shock for an office that has been decimated since President Donald Trump returned to the White House and began remaking national security to give it a laser focus on immigration.

News of the appointment has trickled out in recent weeks, raising alarm among counterterrorism researchers and nonprofit groups funded by CP3. Several said they turned to LinkedIn for intel on Fugate — an unknown in their field — and were stunned to see a photo of “a college kid” with a flag pin on his lapel posing with a sharply arched eyebrow. No threat prevention experience is listed in his employment history.

Typically, people familiar with CP3 say, a candidate that green wouldn’t have gotten an interview for a junior position, much less be hired to run operations. According to LinkedIn, the bulk of Fugate’s leadership experience comes from having served as secretary general of a Model United Nations club.

“Maybe he’s a wunderkind. Maybe he’s Doogie Howser and has everything at 21 years old, or whatever he is, to lead the office. But that’s not likely the case,” said one counterterrorism researcher who has worked with CP3 officials for years. “It sounds like putting the intern in charge.”

In the past seven weeks, at least five high-profile targeted attacks have unfolded across the U.S., including a car bombing in California and the gunning down of two Israeli Embassy aides in Washington. Against this backdrop, current and former national security officials say, the Trump administration’s decision to shift counterterrorism resources to immigration and leave the violence-prevention portfolio to inexperienced appointees is “reckless.”

“We’re entering very dangerous territory,” one longtime U.S. counterterrorism official said.

The fate of CP3 is one example of the fallout from deep cuts that have eliminated public health and violence-prevention initiatives across federal agencies.

The once-bustling office of around 80 employees now has fewer than 20, former staffers say. Grant work stops, then restarts. One senior civil servant was reassigned to the Federal Emergency Management Agency via an email that arrived late on a Saturday.

The office’s mission has changed overnight, with a pivot away from focusing on domestic extremism, especially far-right movements. The “terrorism” category that framed the agency’s work for years was abruptly expanded to include drug cartels, part of what DHS staffers call an overarching message that border security is the only mission that matters. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has largely left terrorism prevention to the states.

ProPublica sent DHS a detailed list of questions about Fugate’s position, his lack of national security experience and the future of the department’s prevention work. A senior agency official replied with a statement saying only that Fugate’s CP3 duties were added to his role as an aide in an Immigration & Border Security office.

“Due to his success, he has been temporarily given additional leadership responsibilities in the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships office,” the official wrote in an email. “This is a credit to his work ethic and success on the job.”

ProPublica sought an interview with Fugate through DHS and the White House, but there was no response.

The Trump administration rejects claims of a retreat from terrorism prevention, noting partnerships with law enforcement agencies and swift investigations of recent attacks. “The notion that this single office is responsible for preventing terrorism is not only incorrect, it’s ignorant,” spokesperson Abigail Jackson wrote in an email.

Through intermediaries, ProPublica sought to speak with CP3 employees but received no reply. Talking is risky; tales abound of Homeland Security personnel undergoing lie-detector tests in leak investigations, as Secretary Kristi Noem pledged in March.

Accounts of Fugate’s arrival and the dismantling of CP3 come from current and former Homeland Security personnel, grant recipients and terrorism-prevention advocates who work closely with the office and have at times been confidants for distraught staffers. All spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal from the Trump administration.

In these circles, two main theories have emerged to explain Fugate’s unusual ascent. One is that the Trump administration rewarded a Gen Z campaign worker with a resume-boosting title that comes with little real power because the office is in shambles.

The other is that the White House installed Fugate to oversee a pivot away from traditional counterterrorism lanes and to steer resources toward MAGA-friendly sheriffs and border security projects before eventually shuttering operations. In this scenario, Fugate was described as “a minder” and “a babysitter.”

DHS did not address a ProPublica question about this characterization.

Rising MAGA Star

The CP3 homepage boasts about the office’s experts in disciplines including emergency management, counterterrorism, public health and social work.

Fugate brings a different qualification prized by the White House: loyalty to the president.

On Instagram, Fugate traced his political awakening to nine years ago, when as a 13-year-old “in a generation deprived of hope, opportunity, and happiness, I saw in one man the capacity for real and lasting change: Donald Trump.”

Fugate is a self-described “Trumplican” who interned for state lawmakers in Austin before graduating magna cum laude a year ago with a degree in politics and law from the University of Texas at San Antonio. Instagram photos and other public information from the past year chronicle his lightning-fast rise in Trump world.

Starting in May 2024, photos show a newly graduated Fugate at a Texas GOP gathering launching his first campaign, a bid for a delegate spot at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. He handed out gummy candy and a flier with a photo of him in a tuxedo at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. Fugate won an alternate slot.

The next month, he was in Florida celebrating Trump’s 78th birthday with the Club 47 fan group in West Palm Beach. “I truly wish I could say more about what I’m doing, but more to come soon!” he wrote in a caption, with a smiley emoji in sunglasses.

Posts in the run-up to the election show Fugate spending several weeks in Washington, a time he called “surreal and invigorating.” In July, he attended the Republican convention, sporting the Texas delegation’s signature cowboy hat in photos with MAGA luminaries such as former Cabinet Secretary Ben Carson and then-Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.).

By late summer, Fugate was posting from the campaign trail as part of Trump’s advance team, pictured at one stop standing behind the candidate in a crowd of young supporters. When Trump won the election, Fugate marked the moment with an emotional post about believing in him “from the very start, even to the scorn and contempt of my peers.”

“Working alongside a dedicated, driven group of folks, we faced every challenge head-on and, together, celebrated a victorious outcome,” Fugate wrote on Instagram.

In February, the White House appointed Fugate as a “special assistant” assigned to an immigration office at Homeland Security. He assumed leadership of CP3 last month to fill a vacancy left by previous Director Bill Braniff, an Army veteran with more than two decades of national security experience who resigned in March when the administration began cutting his staff.

In his final weeks as director, Braniff had publicly defended the office’s achievements, noting the dispersal of nearly $90 million since 2020 to help communities combat extremist violence. According to the office’s 2024 report to Congress, in recent years CP3 grant money was used in more than 1,100 efforts to identify violent extremism at the community level and interrupt the radicalization process.

“CP3 is the inheritor of the primary and founding mission of DHS — to prevent terrorism,” Braniff wrote on LinkedIn when he announced his resignation.

In conversations with colleagues, CP3 staffers have expressed shock at how little Fugate knows about the basics of his role and likened meetings with him to “career counseling.” DHS did not address questions about his level of experience.

One grant recipient called Fugate’s appointment “an insult” to Braniff and a setback in the move toward evidence-based approaches to terrorism prevention, a field still reckoning with post-9/11 work that was unscientific and stigmatizing to Muslims.

“They really started to shift the conversation and shift the public thinking. It was starting to get to the root of the problem,” the grantee said. “Now that’s all gone.”

Critics of Fugate’s appointment stress that their anger isn’t directed at an aspiring politico enjoying a whirlwind entry to Washington. The problem, they say, is the administration’s seemingly cavalier treatment of an office that was funding work on urgent national security concerns.

“The big story here is the undermining of democratic institutions,” a former Homeland Security official said. “Who’s going to volunteer to be the next civil servant if they think their supervisor is an apparatchik?”

Season of Attacks

Spring brought a burst of extremist violence, a trend analysts fear could extend into the summer given inflamed political tensions and the disarray of federal agencies tasked with monitoring threats.

In April, an arson attack targeted Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, who blamed the breach on “security failures.” Four days later, a mass shooter stormed onto the Florida State University campus, killing two and wounding six others. The alleged attacker had espoused white supremacist views and used Hitler as a profile picture for a gaming account.

Attacks continued in May with the apparent car bombing of a fertility clinic in California. The suspected assailant, the only fatality, left a screed detailing violent beliefs against life and procreation. A few days later, on May 21, a gunman allegedly radicalized by the war in Gaza killed two Israeli Embassy aides outside a Jewish museum in Washington.

June opened with a firebombing attack in Colorado that wounded 12, including a Holocaust survivor, at a gathering calling for the release of Israeli hostages. The suspect’s charges include a federal hate crime.

If attacks continue at that pace, warn current and former national security officials, cracks will begin to appear in the nation’s pared-down counterterrorism sector.

“If you cut the staff and there are major attacks that lead to a reconsideration, you can’t scale up staff once they’re fired,” said the U.S. counterterrorism official, who opposes the administration’s shift away from prevention.

Contradictory signals are coming out of Homeland Security about the future of CP3 work, especially the grant program. Staffers have told partners in the advocacy world that Fugate plans to roll out another funding cycle soon. The CP3 website still touts the program as the only federal grant “solely dedicated to helping local communities develop and strengthen their capabilities” against terrorism and targeted violence.

But Homeland Security’s budget proposal to Congress for the next fiscal year suggests a bleaker future. The department recommended eliminating the threat-prevention grant program, explaining that it “does not align with DHS priorities.”

The former Homeland Security official said the decision “means that the department founded to prevent terrorism in the United States no longer prioritizes preventing terrorism in the United States.”

Under the watchful gaze of security guards, dozens of people streamed through metal detectors to enter Temple Israel one evening this month for a town hall meeting on hate crimes and domestic terrorism.

The cavernous synagogue outside of Detroit, one of several houses of worship along a suburban strip nicknamed “God Row,” was on high alert. Police cars formed a zigzag in the driveway. Only registered guests were admitted; no purses or backpacks were allowed. Attendees had been informed of the location just 48 hours in advance.

The intense security brought to life the threat picture described onstage by Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, the recipient of vicious backlash as a gay Jewish Democrat who has led high-profile prosecutions of far-right militants, including the kidnapping plot targeting the governor. Nessel spoke as a slideshow detailed her office’s hate crimes unit, the first of its kind in the nation. She paused at a bullet point about working “with federal and local law enforcement partners.”

“The federal part, not so much anymore, sadly,” she said, adding that the wording should now mention only state and county partners, with help from Washington “TBD.”

“The federal government used to prioritize domestic terrorism, and now it’s like domestic terrorism just went away overnight,” Nessel told the audience. “I don’t think that we’re going to get much in the way of cooperation anymore.”

Across the country, other state-level security officials and violence prevention advocates have reached the same conclusion. In interviews with ProPublica, they described the federal government as retreating from the fight against extremist violence, which for years the FBI has deemed the most lethal and active domestic concern. States say they are now largely on their own to confront the kind of hate-fueled threats that had turned Temple Israel into a fortress.

The White House is redirecting counterterrorism personnel and funds toward President Donald Trump’s sweeping deportation campaign, saying the southern border is the greatest domestic security threat facing the country. Millions in budget cuts have gutted terrorism-related law enforcement training and shut down studies tracking the frequency of attacks. Trump and his deputies have signaled that the Justice Department’s focus on violent extremism is over, starting with the president’s clemency order for militants charged in the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

On the ground, security officials and extremism researchers say, federal coordination for preventing terrorism and targeted violence is gone, leading to a state-level scramble to preserve efforts no longer supported by Washington, including hate-crime reporting hotlines and help with identifying threatening behavior to thwart violence.

This year, ProPublica has detailed how federal anti-extremism funding has helped local communities avert tragedy. In Texas, a rabbi credited training for his actions ending a hostage-taking standoff. In Massachusetts, specialists work with hospitals to identify young patients exhibiting disturbing behavior. In California, training helped thwart a potential school shooting.

Absent federal direction, the fight against violent extremism falls to a hodgepodge of state efforts, some of them robust and others fledgling. The result is a patchwork approach that counterterrorism experts say leaves many areas uncovered. Even in blue states where more political will exists, funding and programs are increasingly scarce.

“We are now going to ask every local community to try to stand up its own effort without any type of guidance,” said Sharon Gilmartin, executive director of Safe States Alliance, an anti-violence advocacy group that works with state health departments.

Federal agencies have pushed back on the idea of a retreat from violent extremism, noting swift responses in recent domestic terrorism investigations such as an arson attack on Democratic Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro in April and a car bombing this month outside a fertility clinic in California. FBI officials say they’re also investigating an attack that killed two Israeli Embassy staff members outside a Jewish museum in Washington in a likely “act of targeted violence.”

Federal officials say training and intelligence-sharing systems are in place to help state and local law enforcement “to identify and respond to hate-motivated threats, such as those targeting minority communities.”

The Justice Department “is focused on prosecuting criminals, getting illegal drugs off the streets, and protecting all Americans from violent crime,” said a spokesperson. “Discretionary funds that are not aligned with the administration’s priorities are subject to review and reallocation.” The DOJ is open to appeals, the spokesperson said, and to restoring funding “as appropriate.”

In an email response to questions about specific cuts to counterterrorism work, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said Trump is keeping promises to safeguard the nation, “whether it be maximizing the use of Federal resources to improve training or establishing task forces to advance Federal and local coordination.”

Michigan, long a hotbed of anti-government militia activity, was an early adopter of strategies to fight domestic extremism, making it a target of conservative pundits who accuse the state of criminalizing right-wing organizing. An anti-Muslim group is challenging the constitutionality of Nessel’s hate crimes unit in a federal suit that has dragged on for years.

In late December, after a protracted political battle, Michigan adopted a new hate crime statute that expands an old law with additions such as protections for LGBTQ+ communities and people with disabilities. Right-wing figures lobbed threatening slurs at the author, state Rep. Noah Arbit, a gay Jewish Democrat who spoke alongside Nessel at Temple Israel, which is in his district and where he celebrated his bar mitzvah.

Arbit acknowledged that his story of a hard-fought legislative triumph is dampened by the Trump administration’s backsliding. In this political climate, Arbit told the audience, “it is hard not to feel like we’re getting further and further away” from progress against hate-fueled violence.

The politicians were joined onstage by Cynthia Miller-Idriss, who leads the Polarization & Extremism Research & Innovation Lab at American University and is working with several states to update their strategies. She called Michigan a model.

“The federal government is gone on this issue,” Miller-Idriss told the crowd. “The future right now is in the states.”

“The Only Diner in Town”

Some 2,000 miles away in Washington state, this month’s meeting of the Domestic Extremism and Mass Violence Task Force featured a special guest: Bill Braniff, a recent casualty of the Trump administration’s about-face on counterterrorism.

Braniff spent the last two years leading the federal government’s main office dedicated to preventing “terrorism and targeted violence,” a term encompassing hate-fueled attacks, school shootings and political violence. Housed in the Department of Homeland Security, the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships treated these acts as a pressing public health concern.

Part of Braniff’s job was overseeing a network of regional coordinators who helped state and local advocates connect with federal resources. Advocates credit federal efforts with averting attacks through funds that supported, for example, training that led a student to report a gun in a classmate’s backpack or programs that help families intervene before radicalization turns to violence.

Another project helped states develop their own prevention strategies tailored to local sensibilities; some focus on education and training, others on beefing up enforcement and intelligence sharing. By early this year, eight states had adopted strategies, eight others were in the drafting stage and 26 more had expressed interest.

Speaking via teleconference to the Seattle-based task force, Braniff said the office is now “being dismantled.” He resigned in March, when the Trump administration slashed 20% of his staff, froze much of the work and signaled deeper cuts were coming.

“The approach that we adopted and evangelized over the last two years has proven to be really effective at decreasing harm and violence,” Braniff told the task force. “I’m personally committed to keeping it going in Washington state and in the rest of the nation.”

A Homeland Security spokesperson did not address questions about the cuts but said in an email that “any suggestion that DHS is stepping away from addressing hate crimes or domestic terrorism is simply false.”

Since leaving government, Braniff has joined Miller-Idriss at the extremism research lab, where they and others aspire to build a national network that preserves an effort once led by federal coordinators. The freezing of prevention efforts, economic uncertainty and polarizing rhetoric in the run-up to the midterm elections create “a pressure cooker,” Braniff said.

Similar discussions are occurring in more than a dozen states, including Maryland, Illinois, California, New York, Minnesota and Colorado, according to interviews with organizers and recordings of the meetings. Overnight, grassroots efforts that once complemented federal work have taken on outsized urgency.

“When you’re the only diner in town, the food is much more needed,” said Brian Levin, a veteran extremism scholar who leads California’s Commission on the State of Hate.

Levin, speaking in a personal capacity and not for the state panel, said commissioners are “pedaling as fast as we can” to fill the gaps. Levin has tracked hate crimes since 1986 and this month released updated research showing incidents nationally hovering near record highs, with sharp increases last year in anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim targeting.

The commission also unveiled results of a study conducted jointly with the state Civil Rights Department and UCLA researchers showing that more than half a million Californians — about 1.6% of the population — said they had experienced hate that was potentially criminal in nature, such as assault or property damage, in the last year.

Prevention workers say that’s the kind of data they can no longer rely on the federal government to track.

“For a commission like ours, it makes our particular mission no longer a luxury,” Levin said.

Hurdles Loom

Some state-level advocates wonder how effectively they can push back on hate when Trump and his allies have normalized dehumanizing language about marginalized groups. Trump and senior figures have invoked a conspiracy theory imagining the engineered “replacement” of white Americans, as the president refers to immigrants as “poisoning the blood” of the country.

Trump uses the “terrorist” label primarily for his political targets, lumping together leftist activists, drug cartels and student protesters. In March, he suggested that recent attacks on Tesla vehicles by “terrorists” have been more harmful than the storming of the Capitol.

“The actions of this administration foment hate,” Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown, a Democrat, told a meeting last month of the state’s Commission on Hate Crime Response and Prevention. “I can’t say that it is solely responsible for hate activity, but it certainly seems to lift the lid and almost encourages this activity.”

A White House spokesperson rejected claims that the Trump administration fuels hate, saying the allegations come from “hoaxes perpetrated by left-wing organizations.”

Another hurdle is getting buy-in from red states, where many politicians have espoused the view that hate crimes and domestic terrorism concerns are exaggerated by liberals to police conservative thought. The starkest example is the embrace of a revisionist telling of the Capitol riots that plays down the violence that Biden-era Justice Department officials labeled as domestic terrorism.

The next year, citing First Amendment concerns, Republicans opposed a domestic terrorism-focused bill introduced after a mass shooting targeting Black people in Buffalo, N.Y.

The leader of one large prevention-focused nonprofit that has worked with Democratic and Republican administrations, speaking on condition of anonymity because of political sensitivities, said it’s important not to write off red states. Some Republican governors have adopted strategies after devastating attacks in their states.

A white supremacist’s rampage through a Walmart in El Paso in 2019 — the deadliest attack targeting Latinos in modern U.S. history — prompted Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to create a domestic terrorism task force. And in 2020, responding to a string of high-profile attacks including the Parkland high school mass shooting, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis released a targeted violence prevention strategy.

The pitch is key, the nonprofit director said. Republican officials are more likely to be swayed by efforts focused on “violence prevention” than on combating extremist ideologies. “Use the language and the framing that works in the context you’re working in,” the advocate said.

Still, gaps will remain in areas such as hate crime reporting, services for victims of violence and training to help the FBI keep up with the latest threats, said Miller-Idriss, the American University scholar.

“What feels awful about it is that there’s just entire states and communities who are completely left out and where people are going to end up being more vulnerable,” she said.

Cautionary Tale From Michigan

On a summer night in 1982, Vincent Chin was enjoying his bachelor party when two white auto workers at a nightclub outside of Detroit targeted him for what was then called “Japan bashing,” hate speech stemming from anger over Japanese car companies edging out American competitors.

The men, apparently assuming the Chinese-born Chin was Japanese, taunted him with racist slurs in a confrontation that spiraled into a vicious attack outside the club. The men beat 27-year-old Chin with a baseball bat, cracking his skull. He died of his injuries four days later and was buried the day after his scheduled wedding date.

Asian Americans’ outrage over a judge’s leniency in the case — the assailants received $3,000 fines and no jail time — sparked a surge of activism seeking tougher hate crime laws nationwide.

In Michigan, Chin’s killing inspired the 1988 Ethnic Intimidation Act, which was sponsored by a Jewish state lawmaker, David Honigman from West Bloomfield Township. More than three decades later, Arbit — the Jewish lawmaker representing the same district — led the campaign to update the statute with legislation he introduced in 2023 and finally saw adopted in December.

“It felt like kismet,” Arbit told ProPublica in an interview a few days after the event at Temple Israel. “This is the legacy of my community.”

But there’s a notable difference. Honigman was a Republican. Arbit is a Democrat.

“It’s sort of telling,” Arbit said, “that in 1988 this was a Republican-sponsored bill and then in 2023 it only passed with three Republican votes.”

Some Republicans argued that the bill infringes on the First Amendment with “content-based speech regulation.” One conservative state lawmaker told a right-wing cable show that the goal is “to advance the radical transgender agenda.”

Arbit said it took “sheer brute force” to enact new hate crimes laws in this hyperpartisan era. He said state officials entering the fray should be prepared for social media attacks, doxing and death threats.

In the summer of 2023, Arbit was waylaid by a right-wing campaign that reduced his detailed proposal to “the pronoun bill” by spreading the debunked idea it would criminalize misgendering someone. Local outlets fact-checked the false claims and Arbit made some 50 press appearances correcting the portrayal — but they were drowned out, he said, by a “disinformation storm” that spread quickly via right-wing outlets such as Breitbart and Fox News. The bill languished for more than a year before he could revive it.

In December 2024, the legislation passed the Michigan House 57-52, with a single Republican vote. By contrast, Arbit said, the bill was endorsed by an association representing all 83 county prosecutors, the majority of them Republicans. Those who see the effects up close, he said, are less likely to view violent extremism through a partisan lens.

“These are real security threats,” Arbit said. “Shouldn’t we want a society in which you’re not allowed to target a group of people for violence?”

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.’”

By the cold math of the justice system, Rhodes was not supposed to be there. He’d gone to sleep the night before in a Maryland prison cell, where he was serving 18 years as a convicted ringleader of the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The Yale-educated firebrand who once boasted a nationwide paramilitary network had seen his organization collapse under prosecution.

For the Justice Department, Rhodes’ seditious conspiracy conviction was bigger than crushing the Oath Keepers — it was a hard-won victory in the government’s efforts to reorient a creaky bureaucracy toward a rapidly evolving homegrown threat. On his first day in office, Trump erased that work by granting clemency to more than 1,500 Jan. 6 defendants, declaring an end to “a grave national injustice.”

Rhodes, sporting a Trump 2020 cap, was back in Washington with fellow “J6ers” within hours of his release in the early hours of Jan. 21, 2025 . In the frigid air outside “the gulag,” as the D.C. Jail is known in this crowd, he was swarmed by TV cameras and supporters offering congratulations. Nearby, far-right Proud Boys members puffed cigars. A speaker blared Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song.”

“It’s surreal,” Rhodes said, absorbing the scene.

The shock of the moment has continued to reverberate far beyond the jailhouse parking lot.

Trump’s pardons immediately upended the biggest single prosecution in U.S. history and signaled a broader reversal that threatens to create a more permissive climate in which extremists could regroup, weaken the FBI’s independence and revive old debates about who counts as a terrorist, according to current and former federal law enforcement officials and national security experts.

In the whirlwind of the last three weeks, the Trump administration has purged federal law enforcement agencies of prosecutors and investigators who’d been pursuing homegrown far-right groups that the FBI lists as among the most dangerous threats to national security. The Biden administration’s 2021 domestic terrorism strategy — the nation’s first — was removed from the White House website. And some government-funded extremism-prevention programs were ordered to stop work.

“There’s no indication that he engaged in any kind of assessment or has even stopped to think, ‘What did I just unleash on America?’” Mary McCord, a former federal prosecutor who oversaw domestic terrorism cases as a senior Justice Department official, said of Trump’s actions.

Colin Clarke, an analyst at the nonpartisan security-focused Soufan Center, said “far right” and “domestic terrorism” are now “kind of dirty words with the current administration.”

Far-right movements that openly promote violence have suddenly been invigorated, he said. “Does this become a four-year period where these groups can really use the time to strengthen their organization, their command and control, stockpile weapons?” he said.

A Sudden Departure

The changes are a departure even from the first Trump White House, which ramped up attention on domestic terrorism in 2019 after attacks including the deadly white supremacist rampage that August targeting Latino shoppers in El Paso, Texas.

The next month, the Department of Homeland Security issued a report that described domestic terrorism as a “growing threat,” that had “too frequently struck our houses of worship, our schools, our workplaces, our festivals, and our shopping spaces.”

Joe Biden made violent extremism a central theme of his 2020 presidential campaign, saying that he’d been inspired to run for office by a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that turned violent, leaving one person dead. His administration’s steps borrowed from previous campaigns to combat AIDS and framed radicalization as a public health priority. Biden also made efforts to address extremism in the ranks of the military and Department of Homeland Security.

Experts described the effort as modest, but the moves were welcomed among counterterrorism specialists as an overdue corrective to a disproportionate focus on Islamist militant groups whose threat to the United States has receded in the decades since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks by al-Qaida.

A failure of authorities to pivot to the homegrown threat was cited in the findings of a Senate panel that examined intelligence missteps ahead of the Capitol attack. The report called for a reevaluation of the government’s analysis of domestic threats, finding that, “Neither the FBI nor DHS deemed online posts calling for violence at the Capitol as credible.”

This Trump administration has shown no appetite for such measures. Instead, the White House pardons are nudging fringe movements deeper into the mainstream and closer to power, said Cynthia Miller-Idriss, who leads an extremism research lab at American University and has testified before Congress about the threat.

“It creates immediate national security risks from people who are pledging revenge and retribution and who have now been valorized,” Miller-Idriss said.

Within 24 hours of his release, Rhodes had embarked on a comeback blitz. He visited the Capitol and stopped by a Dunkin’ Donuts in the House office building. Three days later, he was in a crowd standing behind Trump at a rally in Las Vegas.

Rhodes was among 14 defendants whose charges were commuted rather than being pardoned. Though he didn’t enter the Capitol on Jan. 6, he was convicted of orchestrating the Oath Keepers’ violent actions that day. At trial, prosecutors played a recording of him saying, “My only regret is they should have brought rifles.”

At the Capitol after his release, he told reporters he plans to seek a full pardon.

Extremists Reconnect, Rejoice on X

Emboldened by the pardons and Trump’s laser focus on mass deportations, which is redirecting authorities’ attention, far-right extremists rejoiced at the idea of having more space to organize.

Chat forums filled with would-be MAGA vigilantes who fantasize about rounding up Democratic politicians or acting as bounty hunters to corral undocumented migrants. Researchers noted one Proud Boys chat group where users had posted the LinkedIn pages of corrections officers who purportedly oversaw Jan. 6 detainees.

Newly freed prisoners, no longer subject to orders to stay away from extremists and co-defendants, gathered for a virtual reunion, hosted on Elon Musk’s X platform the weekend after their release. For hours, they talked about what led them to the Capitol, how they were taken into custody and the harsh jail conditions they faced — a vivid, albeit one-sided, oral history of life at the center of what the Justice Department had hailed as a landmark domestic terrorism investigation.

The reunion on X offered a glimpse of men juggling the thrill of their vindication with the mundane logistics of reintegrating to society. One former defendant called in from a Florida shopping mall where he was buying sneakers with his mom. A Montana man who embraces the QAnon conspiracy theory said he was experiencing the most exciting time of his life.

Some were too flustered to articulate their thoughts beyond a deep gratitude for God and Trump. Others sounded fired up, ready to run for office, join a class-action lawsuit over their prosecution or find others ways to, as one pardoned rioter put it, “fight the hell out of this thing.”

Outside the D.C. Jail, pardoned defendants described the whiplash of their sudden status change from alleged and convicted criminals to freed patriots.

William Sarsfield III, a tall, gray-bearded man in a camouflage cap printed with “Biden Sucks,” sipped coffee outside the jail. Before dawn that morning, he’d been released from a Philadelphia detention center where he was awaiting sentencing on felony and misdemeanor convictions.

Court papers, backed by video evidence, describe Sarsfield as joining other Capitol rioters in trying to push through a police line with such force that “one officer could be heard screaming in agonizing pain as he was smashed between a shield and a metal door frame.” Sarsfield insists the charges were inflated, noting that he also helped officers escape the mob that day.

In the runup to Trump’s inauguration, rumors had swirled about an imminent pardon, though details were fuzzy. Sarsfield said his girlfriend was so certain Trump would deliver that she hopped in a truck and raced from Gun Barrel City, an hour southeast of Dallas, to the jail in Philadelphia, a 22-hour drive.

“She drove all the way from Texas on faith,” he said. “Because we both knew it was going to be right. A man’s word is what his word is.”

After his release, Sarsfield said, he headed straight to the D.C. “gulag” to make sure others were getting out, too. He still wore his jail uniform of sweats and orange slippers. The miracle of his freedom was just beginning to sink in.

“I got pardoned by a felon,” Sarsfield said with an incredulous chuckle, referring to Trump’s distinction as the only U.S. president to serve after a felony conviction.

Sarsfield said he planned to show his appreciation by helping Trump “clean up in local communities,” which he said meant working at the grassroots level to expose prosecutors and politicians he believes have corrupted the justice system.

“When people decide not to use the rule of law, that becomes tyrannical,” Sarsfield said. “And in our Constitution I’m pretty sure it says when tyranny becomes law, rebellion becomes duty.”

An “Inflection Point” for Political Violence

The uncertainty of what comes next is nerve-wracking for longtime monitors of violent extremists. Even in their worst-case scenarios, they said, few foresaw the Trump administration sending hundreds of diehard election deniers back into their communities as aggrieved heroes.

“A lot of these people will have martyrdom or legendary status among extremist circles, and that is a very powerful recruiting tool,” said Kieran Doyle, North America research manager for the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, a global conflict monitoring group.

ACLED research shows extremist activity such as demonstrations and acts of political violence has declined since 2023, which saw a 35% reduction in mobilization compared to the previous year. Doyle and other monitors credit the drop in part to the chilling effect of the Justice Department’s post-Jan. 6 crackdown on anti-government and white supremacist movements.

Doyle cautioned that it’s too early to assess the ripple effect of Trump’s clemency on extremist activity. Their ability to regroup depends on several factors, including fear of FBI infiltration, which could subside now that hard-right Trump loyalists are overseeing the Justice Department.

“We’re at an inflection point,” Doyle said.

At the FBI, the Trump administration’s post-clemency vows of payback have sidelined a cohort of senior officials who oversaw the Jan. 6 portfolio of cases, resulting in the loss of some of the bureau’s most seasoned counterterrorism professionals.

Without that expertise, investigators run the risk of violating a suspect’s civil rights or, conversely, overlooking threats because they are assumed to be constitutionally protected, said a veteran FBI analyst who has worked on Jan. 6 cases.

“It has the potential to cut both ways,” the analyst said, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

Many longtime monitors of extremist movements have themselves become targets of threats and violence from Jan. 6 defendants and their supporters, raising anxiety about their release from prison.

Megan Squire, a computer scientist who in 2017 was among the first academic researchers documenting the Proud Boys’ increasingly organized violence, said members are already “saber-rattling and reconstituting dead chapters.”

The group’s former leader, Enrique Tarrio, released from prison in Louisiana, told the far-right Infowars podcast: “Success is going to be retribution.”

All five Proud Boys charged with seditious conspiracy in connection with the Capitol attack were in Squire’s original dataset. Another member who was a Jan. 6 defendant had previously blasted Squire on social media and posted her private information on Telegram.

Squire, who has since joined the civil rights-focused Southern Poverty Law Center, said she finds herself wondering, “Are they going to come after me now?”