WASHINGTON — A federal program designed to prevent targeted violence and terrorism in the United States has lost 20% of its staff after layoffs hit its probationary staffers.
The Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships was a redefined version of programs created after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks as a way to identify people who could pose new terrorism threats or carry out violence and prevent tragedies by getting them help. It has a mission enlisting parents, coaches, teachers and ministers to head off trouble before it starts by training them to look for signs of trouble in advance.
That job became far more difficult after eight members of the center’s staff were fired in early March as part of the Trump administration’s efforts to trim the government by getting rid of probationary staffers. According to a Department of Homeland Security employee and a center employee who was fired, the staffers were rehired late Monday but were then put on administrative leave, following two March 13 court decisions ordering the Republican administration to rehire fired probationary staffers.
The administration vowed to fight the decisions. The staffers spoke on the condition of anonymity out of concerns they might be targeted for retribution.
The center’s director confirmed the terminations in a statement to The Associated Press. William Braniff said that with his appointment to the director’s job ending soon, he decided the best thing he could do for the staffers and for the center was to “resign alongside of them, as some agencies and departments have rehired people in mission critical offices once they were made aware of the implications of those terminations.”
Braniff said there is a huge demand for the assistance provided by the center, called CP3 for short.
“CP3 is the inheritor of the primary and founding mission of DHS — to prevent terrorism,” he said, adding that the center’s approach “is as effective for preventing school shootings as it is for terrorism prevention.”
In a post on LinkedIn before he resigned, Braniff said grant applications last year increased 82% and 27 states were lined up to work with the center to create plans to address targeted violence and prevent terrorism; 16 states already had plans in place or were creating them.
The employees terminated included former social workers, mental health professionals and state public health officials. Before the layoffs there had been more than 40 staff members at the center, with most based in Washington, D.C.
In a statement, Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said President Donald Trump is leading an effort to make “sweeping cuts and reforms” across the federal government to get rid of “ egregious waste and incompetence.”
She said leaders at the department “identified non-mission-critical personnel in probationary status” and added: “DHS remains focused on supporting law enforcement and public safety through funding, training, increased public awareness, and partnerships.”
Tom Warrick, a former counterterrorism official at Homeland Security who’s now at the Atlantic Council, said the center, launched in 2021 under the Biden administration, was intended to develop projects that try to identify people before they turn violent, regardless of ideology or motivation, and steer them toward help through community health programs.
Warrick said that the center has been doing “pioneering” work and that the payoff is “enormous” in terms of shootings and attacks averted.
“What they really need to do is to expand it, not cut it back,” he said.
The grants provide funding to state, local, tribal and territorial governments, nonprofits and education institutions to help them establish or grow their own programs to address targeted violence and terrorism.
The center replaced the Trump-era Office for Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention, which itself replaced an Obama-era program called Countering Violent Extremism. Earlier iterations of the program were criticized for unfairly targeting Muslim and minority communities, and critics said it was difficult to measure results.
Some of those concerns still remain, said Spencer Reynolds, senior counsel to the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program. He said the Brennan Center has long had concerns about the program’s civil liberties protections. Even with the emphasis on bringing in public health providers, he said, there’s still too much of an emphasis on law enforcement.
Last year, the center announced $18 million in grant funding to 35 recipients.
Those grants included $700,000 to the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office in Florida as it worked to “increase community awareness of the signs that someone may be on a pathway to violence.” Another $344,982 went to the Southwest Texas Fusion Center to help it expand its behavioral threat assessment and management team to cover more counties in southwest Texas, where it works to help schools reduce violence.