Employees on the State Division’s Workplace of Countering Violent Extremism and Bureau of Battle and Stabilization Operations, which led U.S. anti-violent extremism efforts, had been laid off, the items shuttered, on July 11, 2025.
This dismantling of the nation’s terrorism and extremism prevention applications started in February 2025. That’s when workers of USAID’s Bureau of Battle Prevention and Stabilization had been placed on depart.
In March, the Middle for Prevention Packages and Partnerships on the Division of Homeland Safety, which labored in the course of the Biden administration to stop terrorism with a workers of about 80 workers, laid off about 30% of its workers. Extra cuts to the middle’s workers had been made in June.
And on July 11, the countering violent extremism crew on the U.S. Institute of Peace, a nonpartisan group established by Congress, was laid off. The destiny of the institute is pending authorized instances and congressional funding.
President Donald Trump in February had known as for nonstatutory elements and features of sure authorities entities, together with the U.S. Institute of Peace, to “be eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law.”
These cuts have drastically restricted the U.S. authorities’s terrorism prevention work. What stays of the U.S. functionality to reply to terrorism rests in its army and legislation enforcement, which don’t work on prevention. They react to terrorist occasions after they occur.
As a political scientist who has labored on prevention applications for USAID, the U.S. Institute for Peace, and as an evaluator of the U.S. technique that carried out the International Fragility Act, I imagine current Trump administration cuts to terrorism prevention applications threat setting America’s counterterrorism work again right into a reactive, army strategy that has confirmed ineffective in lowering terrorism.
The US struggle in opposition to terrorism
Between 9/11 and 2021, the price of the U.S. struggle on terrorism was $8 trillion and 900,000 deaths, based on a Brown College examine. Nonetheless, terrorism has continued to expanded in geographic attain, range and deadliness.
Although it was territorially defeated in Syria in 2019, the Islamic State – designated a overseas terrorist group by the U.S. authorities – has expanded globally, particularly in Africa. Its 9 associates on the continent have joined a number of al-Qaida-linked teams corresponding to al-Shabab.
The Islamic State has expanded by a decentralized mannequin of operations. It has networks of associates that function semi-autonomously and exploit areas of weak governance in locations corresponding to Mali and Burkina Faso. That makes them tough to defeat militarily.
The U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C., on March 18, 2025.
Roberto Schmidt/AFP through Getty Photographs
These terrorist organizations threaten the U.S. by direct assaults, such because the ISIS-linked assault in New Orleans on Jan. 1, 2025, that killed 14 folks.
These teams additionally disrupt the worldwide economic system, corresponding to Houthi assaults on commerce routes within the Crimson Sea.
To know why terrorism and extremism proceed to develop, and to look at what could possibly be executed, Congress charged the U.S. Institute of Peace in 2017 to convene the Job Drive on Extremism in Fragile States.
This bipartisan activity pressure discovered that whereas the U.S. army had battlefield successes, “after each supposed defeat, extremist groups return having grown increasingly ambitious, innovative, and deadly.”
The duty pressure advisable prioritizing and investing in prevention efforts. These embody strengthening the flexibility of governments to offer social companies and serving to communities establish indicators of battle – and serving to to offer instruments to successfully reply after they see the indicators.
The report contributed to the International Fragility Act, which Trump signed in 2019 to fund $1.5 billion over 5 years of prevention work in locations corresponding to Libya, Mozambique and coastal West Africa.
Packages funded by the International Fragility Act included USAID’s Analysis for Peace, which monitored indicators of terrorism recruitment, educated residents in Côte d’Ivoire on group dialogue to resolve disputes, and labored with native leaders and media to advertise peace. All programming beneath the act has shut down because of the elimination of prevention workplaces and bureaus.
What the US has misplaced
The State Division issued a name for funding in July 2025 for a contractor to work on stopping terrorists from recruiting younger folks on-line. It said: “In 2024, teenagers accounted for up to two-thirds of ISIS-linked arrests in Europe, with children as young as 11 involved in recent terrorist plots.”
In the identical month, the division canceled this system resulting from a lack of funding.
It’s the type of program that the now defunct Workplace of Countering Violent Extremism would have overseen. The federal government evidently acknowledges the necessity for prevention work. However it dismantled the experience and infrastructure required to design and handle such responses.
Misplaced experience
The work executed throughout the prevention infrastructure wasn’t good. However it was extremely specialised, with experience constructed over 2½ a long time.
Chris Bosley, a former interim director of the violence and extremism program on the U.S. Institute of Peace who was laid off in July, informed me just lately, “Adequate investment in prevention programs isn’t cheap, but it’s a hell of a lot cheaper than the decades of failed military action, and more effective than barbed wire – tools that come too late, cost too much, and add fuel to the very conditions that perpetuate the threats they’re meant to address.”
For now, the U.S. has misplaced a trove of counterterrorism experience. And it has eliminated the guardrails – group engagement protocols and battle prevention applications – that helped keep away from the unintended penalties of U.S. army responses.
With out prevention efforts, we threat repeating a number of the dangerous outcomes of the previous. These embody army abuses in opposition to civilians, prisoner radicalization in detention services and the lack of public belief, corresponding to what occurred in Guantanamo Bay, in Bagram, Afghanistan, and at varied CIA black websites in the course of the George W. Bush administration.
Counterterrorism prevention specialists anticipate terrorism to worsen. Dexter Ingram, the previous director of the State Division’s Workplace of Countering Violent Extremism who was laid off in July, informed me: “It seems like we’re now going to try shooting our way out of this problem again, and it’s going to make the problem worse.”
Federal brokers patrol New Orleans, La., following a terrorist assault on Jan. 1, 2025.
Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP through Getty Photographs
What could be executed?
Rebuilding a prevention-focused strategy with experience would require political will and bipartisan help.
U.S. Reps. Sara Jacobs, a Democrat from California, and Mike McCaul, a Texas Republican, have launched a invoice that will reauthorize the International Fragility Act, extending it till 2030. It could permit the U.S. authorities to proceed stopping conflicts, radicalization and serving to unstable nations. The measure would additionally enhance the way in which varied authorities companies collaborate to realize these objectives.
However its success hinges on securing funding and restoring or creating new workplaces with skilled workers that may deal with the problems that result in terrorism.
This evaluation was developed with analysis contributions from Saroy Rakotoson and Liam Painter at Georgetown College.
