(March 19): The Trump administration’s purge of US government workers has gutted a Department of Homeland Security unit created to combat online radicalisation and credited with helping disrupt more than 1,000 violent plots in the past few years, according to current and former officials.

Roughly 20% of probationary employees were dismissed or resigned from the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships (CP3) in recent weeks, according to two current officials and one former employee who requested anonymity because they weren’t authorised to speak on the matter. The CP3 is the primary federal unit focused on proactively stopping extremist violence around the country.

Many of the recently departed workers helped state and local authorities through US$79 million (RM350.85 million) in federal grants aimed at keeping online threats from turning into real world attacks. Their work supported programmes to study the impact of online misinformation and radicalisation, educate police departments on how to prevent politically motivated violence and train school administrators to work with students at risk of being influenced to make racially motivated threats.

The immediate effect of the change, current officials said, will be to cut support to state efforts to create anti-domestic terrorism strategies. Those plans, which CP3 helps craft, typically provide guidance for law enforcement efforts to assess threats from homegrown violent extremist organisations, such as white supremacist groups or anti-government militias. Twelve states have lost their liaisons with CP3 as a result of the dismissals, according to the officials.

Tricia McLaughlin, a DHS spokeswoman, said in a statement that the department had identified some non-mission critical personnel in probationary status as part of government-wide cost-cutting efforts.

“DHS remains focused on supporting law enforcement and public safety through funding, training, increased public awareness, and partnerships,” McLaughlin said. “US taxpayer dollars are being used wisely and for mission critical efforts.”

The reductions in CP3 staffing follow the loss at DHS of more than 200 cybersecurity experts who had worked to secure government computers from Russian and Chinese hackers. The ousters spring from efforts by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to slash the federal workforce. Bloomberg reported last week that at least one senior official in DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency had resigned in protest, citing concern that the cuts created massive security vulnerabilities.  

During the past few years, CP3 has supported 1,172 interventions for individuals who were threatening to engage in violence, including cases where suspects had assembled weapons caches and written manifestos describing their motivations for violence, said William Braniff, who resigned as the unit’s director on March 3.

The goal, Braniff said in an interview, has been to get law enforcement agencies, state governments and schools to adopt a prevention-first mindset that seeks to stop mass casualty events before they happen instead of only investigating such crimes after the fact.

“This kind of work can be transformational in the nation for stopping premeditated violence,” Braniff said of CP3’s efforts.

Grants awarded under CP3’s terrorism prevention plan also are under review, according to one current official. Amid political pressure from Republican lawmakers, DHS in recent years has moved away from funding programs that study online behaviour, in favour of offline police training, Bloomberg previously reported.

Former FBI director Christopher Wray testified to Congress in 2022 that individual attackers who are radicalised online and attack civilian targets with easy-to-obtain weapons were among the top US national security threats. The FBI also recently ranked racially motivated violent extremists on the same threat level as foreign terrorist groups like Islamic State, one of the bureau’s top counterterrorism officials said in 2024.

Roughly 399 people were killed and 702 wounded in roughly 1,800 terrorist or targeted violence incidents in the US between Jan 1, 2023 and the end of 2024, according to figures compiled by the University of Maryland.

The CP3 changes are part of a larger administrative effort to bring federal agencies into compliance with President Donald Trump’s executive orders, in particular his push to deport undocumented migrants from the US.

Remaining DHS officials who specialise in anti-terrorism work recently received a questionnaire asking them to answer how their professional experience would apply to the Trump administration’s border security efforts, according to internal communications reviewed by Bloomberg News. 

DHS administrators in the message asked CP3 staffers to note any prior experience not relevant to their current responsibilities, including any former law enforcement or former military experience. 

An attachment to that message cited a range of administration priorities, including ordering DHS officials to evaluate whether they can build additional infrastructure at the military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where Trump has said the government intends to house as many as 30,000 undocumented migrants. That plan has been put on hold owing to legal challenges and insufficient detention facilities at the base.   

Another DHS priority also includes identifying other military bases capable of holding migrants, and then identifying other countries that can accept deportees, according to the communications reviewed by Bloomberg News. 

That message has stirred alarm among remaining CP3 staff that they could be reassigned to Guantanamo Bay in order to aid efforts there, according to two current officials. 

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