According to the unpublished bulletin, FEMA funds may not necessarily be yanked back from the states. Rather, current and future grant recipients need to re-categorize activities that are currently classified as addressing domestic violent extremism, fitting projects into new national priority areas outlined by FEMA. These new priorities, which were announced last week, include the protection of soft targets like election sites, cybersecurity, election security (“including verifying that poll workers are US citizens”), and “supporting border crisis response and enforcement.”
The bulletin lists some examples of activities that can continue to be funded if they are reworked to remove domestic violent extremism-related elements, including “transforming a tabletop exercise that previously centered on DVE threats into one that addresses a wider range of hazards, including severe weather, active shooter incidents, or cyberattacks.” Activities that cannot be “thoroughly repurposed,” the bulletin states, must be “discontinued.”
A separate FEMA document obtained by WIRED shows that ending the funding streams for domestic violent extremism work in FEMA came up in meetings with OMB. This document references a May 16 briefing with OMB, and lists a range of follow-up questions that FEMA staff were working on addressing as late as mid-July.
“How do we make sure no more money is spent on domestic violence [sic] extremism,” one bullet point asks. “Legally, how do we do that?”
The explanation provided by FEMA staff suggested amending open award packages to remove the minimum spending requirement for combating domestic violent extremism and to “notify recipients that any project previously approved to counter domestic violent extremism be reprogrammed for a different [national priority area].” The document acknowledges that the “strategy carries some legal risk because it is changing the terms of an open award.” It states that FEMA staff were working on an information bulletin to “implement” the change.
“We will update OMB when this has been accomplished,” the memo states.
Domestic violent extremism attacks in recent years have focused increasingly on power grids and other infrastructure. The Department of Energy logged 185 physical and cyber attacks on power grids in 2023 alone, up from just 96 in 2020. In February, the founder of a neo-Nazi group was convicted of plotting to attack electric grids in “furtherance of [his]racially or ethnically motivated violent extremist beliefs,” according to the Justice Department. In July, the leader of anti-government extremist group Veterans on Patrol told WIRED that an attack on a weather radar was part of a campaign from that group, which erroneously assumed that the government had used weather modification to create a “weather weapon” that caused the floods in Texas.
Still, over the last 6 months, government work intended to track, analyze, understand and combat domestic violent extremism has faced significant cuts. The Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships, a program housed within DHS designed to prevent domestic violent extremism within the US, has lost 20% of its staff since the beginning of the year. It is currently being led by a 22-year-old former intern from the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing organization that authored Project 2025, the document used as a policy blueprint by the Trump administration for much of this year. Last month, DHS announced it would axe “wasteful, misdirected” grants run by the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships, terminating funding for “LBGTQ+ propaganda” and “biased anti-extremism initiatives.”