The Trump administration has weakened America’s counterterrorism defenses by downsizing staff, politicizing intelligence, cutting grants and forcing federal agents to focus on immigration enforcement, according to a new report by Democratic lawmakers on the Senate Homeland Security Committee that was obtained by MS NOW.

The 37-page report also accuses the administration of skewing its focus on domestic terrorism almost exclusively to left-wing groups, ignoring significant threats from far-right and white supremacist extremists.

“Since the first day of his second term, President Trump and his Administration have dismantled critical national security agencies and programs and diverted significant resources and attention away from the fight against terrorism,” the report says. 

“These actions are the result of a combination of ideologically motivated firings and realignment of personnel and the wielding of government resources — from grants to counterterrorism authorities — as a weapon against political opponents. The Administration’s actions have left Americans far more vulnerable to a potential terrorist attack, and left law enforcement officers and agents without the tools to protect our nation,” it continues.

The report says the second Trump administration has significantly degraded the vast counterterrorism infrastructure that was built after the 9/11 attacks and refined over the 25 years since. 

MS NOW has reached out to the White House for comment on the report.

The report examines a series of moves by the Trump administration that have been covered by the news media, including MS NOW, and argues that, taken together, they have made America less safe.

For example, the report says the Justice Department and the FBI have lost more than 15,000 employees, including many experienced national security professionals. Others have been reassigned, including the entire staff of the FBI’s Domestic Terrorism Operations Section, which provided operational support to all 55 FBI field offices in investigating domestic terrorism threats, the report says. 

The DOJ’s National Security Division, which includes the counterterrorism and intelligence sections, has lost nearly 38% of its personnel, the report adds. As MS NOW has reported, those departures included some of the government’s most experienced national security lawyers.

“These cuts basically mean there are fewer experienced professionals put there doing what they have to do, which is track threats,” said Sen. Gary Peters, the ranking Democrat on the committee.

The report says the administration has eviscerated key Department of Homeland Security components by removing more than 1,300 personnel involved in preventing, countering and responding to terrorism.

MS NOW has reached out to the FBI, DOJ and DHS for comment on the report’s claims.

The administration has also gutted CISA, the agency responsible for protecting critical infrastructure against both cyber and physical attacks. CISA runs cyber hygiene vulnerability scans and penetration testing for utilities, hospitals and election systems, identifying exploitable weaknesses before American adversaries, including terrorists, can exploit them. But now it’s doing much less of that work, the report says.

The Trump administration also cut almost $1 billion in national security and public safety grants to state and local government agencies, the report says.

And it has required law enforcement officers and agents, intelligence analysts and lawyers from across the government to focus on immigration enforcement “to the detriment of the national security and homeland security missions from which they were pulled,” according to the report.

The report also criticizes how the Trump administration has defined terrorists and terrorism, saying it has politicized and undermined counterterrorism efforts.

“The designation of cartels and gangs as foreign terrorist organizations has redefined terrorism and stretched the capacity of the country’s counterterrorism personnel and resources,” the report says.

It adds that the designation of antifa as a domestic terrorist organization was illegal and politically motivated.

And it says Trump has downplayed certain kinds of terrorism and redirected counterterrorism resources away from lethal threats to the nation in favor of persecuting the his political opponents.

For example, the report says the administration quietly removed a DOJ study from its website showing that since 1990, far-right extremist attacks have outpaced all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism.

The most recent Annual Threats Assessment of the Intelligence Community, released March 17, “also bears out fears of politicized intelligence, particularly with regards to terrorism and Iran,” the report says. “It makes no mention of domestic terrorism including lone actors, white supremacists, or threats to U.S. elections.”

The administration’s May 2026 counterterrorism strategy focuses on cartels, gangs and “legacy Islamist terrorists,” the report says, along with a third priority: “violent leftwing extremists, including anarchists and anti-Fascists.”

That strategy report notes, “For the 25th Anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks, America has returned to a common sense and reality-based Counterterrorism Strategy.”

“President Trump has affected a complete revision of how we defeat threats to America predicated on national sovereignty and civilizational confidence and the objective of destroying the groups who would kill Americans or hurt our interests as a free nation. This applies to cartels, Jihadists, left-wing violent extremists, state actors and state sponsors, or any future terror threat,” the strategy reads.

But the report from the Democratic senators notes that the strategy “excludes mention of any domestic terrorists who are not left-wing.”

“The new strategy also completely ignores the threat of white supremacists — despite the most recent attack on the Islamic Center of San Diego carried out by two teenagers who were inspired by hate and referenced the shooter in the Christchurch, New Zealand, mosque attack in 2019,” the report says.

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From MS Now.