Homeland Security’s broken terrorist prevention program needs to end

For nearly a decade, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has awarded annual grants to government and local community groups working to “prevent individuals from radicalizing to violence.” And for nearly a decade, the Department has failed to measure the impact of these “terrorism prevention” efforts, let alone show that they work. 

In December, after Congress demanded evidence of the efficacy of the Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention grants program, DHS released a report that failed to produce any.

Outside studies, meanwhile, have found that the $20 million a year program does nothing for national security, promotes junk science, discriminates against communities of color and sometimes funds activities that have more to do with shaping societal views than preventing terrorism. Yet DHS has again asked Congress for $20 million to fund the program. 

In the coming days, when lawmakers vote on the Department’s budget, they should pull the plug on this harmful initiative.

To understand why the program needs to be scrapped, consider a sampling of grants from the past three years. They include funding for the University of Central Oklahoma to develop a “tolerance training” program to mitigate “bias and discrimination” in the homes and communities of pre-K and elementary school students. A Columbia University program aims to tackle “othering” — or treating certain groups as different and often inferior — in middle and high school students.

Three projects want to use video games to engage young people. One plans to foster “pro-social behaviors” and another to promote “self-regulation and interpersonal dynamics” through competitive gaming teams. A third will develop a game that puts players in government, media and industry roles to identify and address disinformation.

Whatever the merits of programs like these that seek to shape social attitudes in young adults and children, they have only the most tenuous relationship to terrorism prevention.

The grants program raises other concerns too. After years of criticism that it was too reliant on law enforcement, the department announced a new model emphasizing “mental health” and “alternatives to investigation and/or prosecution.” 

But a recent Brennan Center analysis found that more than half the 40 projects funded in 2022 involved police, and that the program’s approach frequently amounts to co-opting mental health professionals to help identify suspects for law enforcement.

The program has long targeted minority communities and viewpoints. At first under the Obama administration, it targeted almost exclusively Muslim Americans, seemingly on the assumption that Islamic religious practices were themselves predictive of violence. Under the Trump administration, grant recipients functioned largely to provide law enforcement information about American Muslims, Black Lives Matter activists and LGBTQ people.

As a presidential candidate, Joe Biden promised to end the program. Instead, his administration gave it a new name — the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships — and announced it would shift its primary focus to what security agencies call the most significant terrorist threat facing our nation today: white supremacist violence. Yet only two DHS projects funded in fiscal year 2022, the most recent publicly available, specifically target that threat, and fewer than a quarter even mention it.

The deeper problem with DHS’s program is that it relies on the false premise that people who commit mass violence can reliably be identified in advance, while on the path to “radicalizing.” It assumes that certain “behaviors” and “risk factors” indicate that an individual is likely to commit violence. This assumption is false and counterproductive.

In practice, these supposed red flags — like living alone, having experienced childhood trauma, using drugs, expressing certain religious or political views, or showing a propensity for “thrill-seeking” behavior — apply to millions of Americans, the vast majority of whom do not go on to commit violence or terrorism.

Broad, vague indicators invite the police and public to inject biases into the process, resulting in their targeting of the minority communities that so frequently bear the burden of national security overreach, such as American Muslims after Sept. 11, 2001.

Yet these are among the “warning signs” touted by grant recipients cited by the Department of Homeland Security in its December report requested by Congress. Lawmakers sought evidence for the program’s effectiveness based on “peer-reviewed research” but DHS mostly cited government-created reports and a single independent study that undercut its case, finding that many indicators the program uses “actually have relatively small relationships with radicalization outcomes.”

Congress also directed DHS to describe how grant recipients ensure they protect the privacy, civil rights and civil liberties of the people they target. DHS’s program office emphasizes that it works with the department’s civil rights office and has issued standards for grantees. But it does not explain these standards or how they are enforced. As I wrote in an in-depth report on broken DHS oversight, the department’s civil rights office is frequently sidelined and its counsel ignored.

DHS does not appear even to have attempted to measure its violence prevention efforts’ impact in actually preventing violence. Instead, it measures performance with busywork metrics like the number of participants in classes and how often teams meet. These metrics simply show that grantees are doing something, not that their work is effective.

For years, DHS’s Targeted Violence and Terror Prevention grants have failed to deliver any security value while squandering resources and fostering bias and baseless suspicion. Congress gave the program a fair shake, but the time has come to eliminate it.

Spencer Reynolds is former senior intelligence counsel in the Office of the General Counsel of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. He is now senior counsel in the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law.