Trump Administration Pulls Plug on Domestic Terrorism Tracking and Analysis Project

The Global Terrorism Database’s Terrorism and Targeted Violence (T2V) in the United States project is an open-source database that contains information on thousands of domestic terrorist attacks that have occurred in the nation. It includes data on a range of attacks, including targeted attacks, such as workplace violence, school shootings, hate crimes, attacks on critical infrastructure, and more.

It was an invaluable resource for law enforcement, researchers, security practitioners, and policymakers until Tuesday, 25 March. That’s when the Trump Administration pulled its funding—roughly $3 million, according to The Washington Post—and the site was taken down.

The database was led by the University of Maryland (UMD), which also runs the Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START)—a university-based research and education center.

The Post reported that it reviewed an email from the Department of Homeland Security, which told email recipients that “the scope of work performed under this award no longer effectuates Department priorities.” No specific details were provided in the email.

Originally created in response to the FY2020 National Defense Authorization Act, the DHS’s Strategic Framework for Countering Terrorism and Targeted Violence Implementation Plan, and the White House’s National Strategy for Countering Domestic Extremism, the T2V site was the only publicly available dataset that provided information on the breadth and types of terrorism and targeted violence in the country.

Since its creation, T2V published data and insights into threats of terrorism and targeted violence against everyday Americans. Some examples, according to a statement on the DHS’s decision posted on the START website:

• The most recent data indicated that during the first two months of 2025, there was a 25 percent increase in terrorism and targeted violence events compared to the same period in 2024.
• It found that throughout 2023 and 2024, across more than 900 U.S. cities there were more than 1,800 terrorism and targeted violence events—averaging three events every day.
• Out of these attacks, there were nearly 400 fatalities and more than 700 more people were injured.
• Approximately 400 of these events targeted U.S. schools. The 81 successful attacks targeting educational facilities killed dozens of children.
• Older age cohorts are increasingly carrying out terrorism attacks and targeted violence crimes—an age group often not targeted in prevention programs, which tend to focus on juveniles.

Other insight provided by T2V data indicated “that grievance-motivated mass violence—a type of public safety harm that has been understudied and virtually ignored by the homeland security community—is the deadliest form of targeted violence in the United States.”

The data also show an increasing “intersection of terrorism, hate crime (especially anti-Semitism), and school-based mass violence—something that state and local law enforcement are neither trained nor prepared to detect and counter.”

Beyond maintaining the dataset, the T2V project also provided training on the modern and evolving threat landscape to more than 15,000 state, local, and territorial law enforcement officers. Similarly, the project will no longer help terrorism prevention practitioners design evidence-based programs, nor assist the federal government in evaluating the Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative when it comes to targeted violence.

“We are greatly concerned about what this means for public safety moving forward,” the statement said, written by Michael Jensen, the project’s principal investigator and research director for START.

UMD is appealing the decision, according to the statement.