Why is Trump killing programs designed to prevent terrorism?

With political violence on the rise in America and the assassination of conservative political activist Charlie Kirk still sending shockwaves throughout the citizenry, one would think the Trump administration would be using every tool at its disposal to prevent targeted violence and domestic terrorism. Sadly, it is not.

Indeed, since returning to office in January, U.S. President Donald Trump and his Department of Government Efficiency have been dismantling the very programs designed to prevent targeted violence and domestic terrorism. And with its proposed 2026 budget, the administration and its allies in Congress are attempting to make the elimination of those programs the law of the land.

The House Committee on Appropriations, comprised of 34 Republicans and 27 Democrats, couldn’t have been clearer when it said in a June press release that the 2026 Homeland Security funding bill, “Fails to protect Americans from terrorism and violent extremists by underfunding programs that enhance Americans' ability to respond to, prepare for and counter extremism.”

As a career official in the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Counterterrorism, I helped establish the Office of Countering Violent Extremism in 2016. Our mission was to understand why some people embrace terrorism while others in the same family, classroom or community do not — and to design programs that address those root causes. To do this, I drew on insights from researchers, mental-health professionals, religious leaders and community members.

The case of the Laachraoui brothers in Belgium stands out to me. Mourad Laachraoui represented Belgium in taekwondo at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, but his older brother Najim was one of two ISIS suicide bombers who killed 16 people at the Brussels Airport earlier that year. In the wake of these attacks, the State Department supported countering violent extremism programs across Belgium, which combined with the government of Belgium’s efforts allowed the country to reduce the terrorist threat level. These programs trained parents to identify the warning signs in their children and built resilience against terrorism among youth in communities targeted by ISIS recruiters.

In June 2019, the State Department brought U.S. experts to Kazakhstan to train mental health professionals and social workers how to rehabilitate and reintegrate women and children of ISIS fighters who had been repatriated from Syria and Iraq. An effective community-based approach allowed these people to return to their communities and not become a burden for security services. This example inspired other countries to repatriate their own nationals from Syria and Iraq to rehabilitate them.

Domestically, the proposed cuts to the Department of Homeland Security’s Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention programs have drawn criticism. At a budget hearing in May, New York Rep. Tim Kennedy told Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem that it was “blatant negligence” to cut funding for prevention of domestic terrorism, using the racially motivated attack in Buffalo in 2022 where 10 people were killed as an example of the threat people in his district face.

One of my deepest concerns as a counterterrorism official was political violence against public officials, which we’ve seen recently in the U.S. with the murder of Democratic Minnesota Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, and last year’s assassination attempts on Donald Trump, one of which wounded the then-presidential candidate.

The growing wave of political violence is not isolated to U.S. shores but is spreading, along with political and religious extremism, to all corners of the world. The assassination of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, for example, was not an isolated tragedy, but part of a growing global trend: extremists across ideologies and individuals with personal grudges targeting elected leaders, journalists and other symbols of democracy.

In Poland in 2019, Gdansk Mayor Pawel Adamowicz was stabbed to death on stage by a recently released criminal who had been obsessed with coverage of the liberal official by conservative media. In the case of Abe’s murder, the assassin held a personal grudge against the former prime minister and used a homemade firearm. In Slovakia in May 2024, Prime Minister Robert Fico was seriously wounded when a gunman shot him five times because of the conservative politician’s opposition to aid for Ukraine.

Despite these attacks on politicians happening more frequently, the Trump administration shuttered the Office of Countering Violent Extremism, dismissing all six staff members, including me, in July. Support for the Strong Cities Network, which had empowered mayors and other local officials around the world to promote social cohesion and counter polarization, was also terminated.

Initiatives to counter white supremacy — a term we were told not to use — were also discontinued. The fate of programs to counter online radicalization are uncertain as the experts who worked on this issue were fired. This move was not simply a bureaucratic reshuffle — it signaled to allies and adversaries alike that prevention is dispensable. Authoritarian governments, in particular, took note. The message from the Trump administration was taken by many leaders — from Asia to Europe, Africa to the Middle East — to mean that repression by force matters more than addressing the social and psychological drivers of radicalization.

After the horrific attacks on 9/11, the U.S. began to better understand these social and psychological drivers, understanding that this was not a problem unique to America and its ideological enemies. In the wake of 9/11, our office worked globally drawing important lessons from terrorist attacks around the world. We knew, for instance, that terrorist organizations learned from each other when it came to recruitment, tactics and strategy. After the 1995 Tokyo subway sarin attack, for example, al-Qaida and ISIS studied Aum Shinrikyo’s tactics, implementing them in their own terror attacks when possible.

Given the global nature of the threat, a crucial part of our work was investigating terror networks worldwide, their methods and tactics and ways to de-radicalize their members. For instance, we drew important lessons from Colombia’s reintegration of members of the Marxist–Leninist guerrilla group FARC to guide our handling of ISIS returnees from Syria and Iraq. We partnered with the now-shuttered U.S. Agency for International Development and allied governments to launch the Global Community Engagement and Resilience Fund, pooling U.S., Japanese and European resources to support grassroots initiatives in Bangladesh, Kenya and Somalia.

The impact was tangible. In Bangladesh, after the 2016 Dhaka cafe attack that killed 24 people — including seven Japanese nationals — we discovered that the perpetrators were not poor or desperate but isolated university students from affluent families. This led to new programs training social workers and mental-health professionals to support vulnerable youth before extremists could exploit them.

At home, prevention was just as critical. Our colleagues at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security broadened their work from “countering violent extremism” to “targeted violence and terrorism prevention,” recognizing that mass shootings often follow similar radicalization pathways as terrorism. Many attackers checked multiple boxes — mental-health issues, political grievances, gender identity struggles, narcissism — underscoring that prevention required nuanced, multidisciplinary solutions, not just law enforcement.

Despite promising results, these programs were chronically underfunded, sacrificed to political narratives that favored policing over prevention. The Counterterrorism Bureau has also been asked to counter Latin American drug cartels, including by using terrorist designations instead of the sanctions designed to hold these criminal organizations accountable. By eliminating the offices and experts dedicated to this mission and asking those who remain to counter drug cartels, the Trump administration has set the U.S. back years. Rebuilding will take far longer than dismantling.

The threats we face — whether from Islamist groups, white supremacists, right- or left-wing extremists or lone actors — are not confined by borders. Japan, like the United States, knows the cost of political violence. Prevention programs may not solve every problem, but without them, governments are left with only reaction and repression. That is not a sustainable path for any democracy.