By Ellie Silverman · The Washington Post (c) 2025
The Trump administration stopped funding a national database tracking domestic terrorism, hate crimes and school shootings in a sweeping round of cuts to violence prevention projects, eliminating a resource aimed to improve safety in the face of consistent and urgent threats.
Records obtained by The Washington Post show the cancellation of nearly $20 million for 24 projects dating as far back as July 2021. A representative for the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The database, run out of the University of Maryland and supported by $3 million from DHS, disappeared Tuesday morningfrom the START consortium for terrorism research’s website. A DHS email reviewed by The Post notified recipients last week that “the scope of work performed under this award no longer effectuates Department priorities” without providing specific details.
Over the last two years, the U-Md. data showed there were nearly three violent events daily, killing nearly 400 people and injuring more than 700, Michael Jensen, the project’s principal investigator and the research director at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at U-Md., wrote in a statement that replaced the online database Tuesday morning.
Jensen said this cancellation comes at a time when their data revealed the first two months of 2025 saw a 25 percent increase in terrorism and targeted violence incidents compared to the first two months of last year.
Amy Cooter, the deputy director of the Institute for Countering Digital Extremism, said she’s worried the cuts to violence prevention efforts across the federal government will hamper the renewed fight against domestic terrorism.
“We’re seeing a real end of our ability to stay on top of extremist trends and threats from a governmental perspective,” Cooter said.
A research project to avert school shootings, an evaluation of a method used to redirect online searches away from extremist content and a study focused on early detection and intervention of people planning terrorist attacks were also among those to lose funding, records show. All were supported by the DHS Science and Technology Directorate, which funds social and behavioral science research for violence prevention efforts.
The people running the programs being cut claim the orders to stop their work violates federal provisions, according to two recipients and a DHS official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak to reporters. The University of Maryland is appealing the decision to halt the database, Jensen wrote.
“I’m certain there’s no legal reason or legal legs for this to stand on,” said the DHS official. “We’re losing the ability to coordinate and provide the best, most rigorous evidence for how to prevent these kinds of attacks, and to prevent them while respecting people’s civil rights.”
The country’s counterterrorism efforts rely on a kaleidoscope of experts, strategies and programs ranging from Justice Department and FBI analysts, investigators and prosecutors to government-funded research at universities and intervention programs within community groups, local hospitals, synagogues, police departments and schools.
The national database of violent incidents, which the University of Maryland’s START consortium for terrorism research launched earlier this year, was developed to help the Department of Homeland Security fulfill its Congressionally-mandated requirement and the agency’s stated goals to collect data on successful and attempted terrorism and targeted violence across the country.
President Donald Trump last month also shut down a nationwide database tracking misconduct by federal police officers – which was first proposed by Trump in 2020 – deleting a resource that experts said improved public safety by helping to prevent bad officers from jumping to new agencies and starting over with clean records.
Under the first Trump administration, a DHS report acknowledged that “current national-level statistics on terrorism and targeted violence in all its forms are not comprehensive,” but having such data “will better position DHS to protect communities from these threats.” A 2022 Senate committee report found that the FBI and DHS were failing to track and assess the threat of domestic terrorism, despite being legally required to do so.
“We are greatly concerned about what this means for public safety moving forward,” Jensen wrote.
For many recipients, the orders to stop their federally funded work come as projects were underway, which they said will ultimately waste millions of dollars already invested in research that now may never be finished.
At the University of Illinois at Chicago, grant recipient and psychiatry professor Stevan Weine said he was given 42 minutes to respond to an email last week and submit outstanding expenses.
The university requested guidance on howto appeal DHS’s decision, Weine said, arguing that the agency used a faulty interpretation of federal policy to terminate the grant. Weine’s research was focused on safety in elementary, middle and high schools across six states – Massachusetts, Illinois, Connecticut, Ohio, Texas and Florida – and developing effective strategies for school-based threat assessment teams.
The study was aimed at finding ways for teachers, parents, school administrators, policymakers, mental health professionals, law enforcement and students to work together to stop the next school shooting.
“I’m just appalled at what’s going to be lost by not being able to help schools do a better job at keeping people safe,” said Weine, the director of the Center for Global Health at the University of Illinois, Chicago. “This is a slash and burn approach to matters of public safety, terrorism prevention and school violence and I find that to be just unconscionable.”
Christopher Harris, a criminal justice professor at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, said his team completed the first two steps in his project, researching the influence of white supremacy and ideology in policing, including a national survey of police departments regarding policies prohibiting affiliations with far-right groups.
Next, he was planning to survey individual police officers around the country on the topic. But now, the final phases of a project that began in September 2021, has been stopped.
“We’re definitely going to try to push back against this to some degree,” Harris said.
The U-Md. national database provided insights on how often individuals attempt a violent attack, including whether the incident was successful, failed or thwarted by law enforcement.
Staff working on the project can no longer provide this data for those looking to better understand and prevent violence, including quarterly briefings with homeland security professionals, Jensen wrote. They will cancel plans totrain more than 15,000 officers across the country, And they will nothelp design prevention programs or assist the federal government in evaluating its terrorism prevention initiative.
“In its short lifespan, the public data produced new (and alarming) insights on the threat that terrorism and targeted violence pose to everyday Americans,” Jensen wrote, later adding: “While this is a setback for everyone dedicated to stopping mass violence in the United States, we must keep moving forward – the stakes are simply too high to do otherwise.”