Washington, D.C. — Buried in Trump’s FY2027 budget is funding for a new FBI-led unit called the NSPM-7 Joint Mission Center, a ten-agency operation dedicated to proactively identifying Americans the government classifies as “domestic terrorists.” In reality, it’s just a supersized effort to target Trump’s political opponents using the most powerful domestic law enforcement agency in the country.
According to the budget document, the following speech (nevermind the First Amendment) counts as a red flag: “anti-Americanism,” “anti-capitalism,” “anti-Christianity,” “extremism on migration, race, and gender,” and “hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”
The criteria are so broad and vague that they hand the administration a pretext to go after virtually any progressive nonprofit, civil society organization, advocacy group, labor union, or faith community it doesn’t like, none of whom are violent and none of whom are terrorists. The unit is already operational, with a watchlist reportedly listing some 5,000 Americans as of last fall.
The administration would have you believe this is a response to real threats. But the data says otherwise. In the last thirty-five years, there have been more than five times as many attacks from right-wing domestic extremists than left-wing groups, research the administration has conveniently scrubbed that research from the Department of Justice’s website. It is now seeking $166 million and hundreds of new positions to fully implement their plan.
In response, Congressional Integrity Project Senior Advisor Kyle Herrig released the following statement:
“Free speech be damned. Rather than a legitimate counterterrorism program, the Trump administration is building a political enemies list with a federal badge behind it. Put simply, they’re targeting Americans for their speech and their beliefs. The same administration that has frozen billions in grants to nonprofits it disagrees with now has a ten-agency fusion center dedicated to finding ‘criminal actors’ among those same organizations.
“This is the infrastructure of authoritarian targeting, and Congress cannot stay silent. Republicans who claim to care about civil liberties and government overreach need to explain why they’re standing idly by while the FBI builds a pre-crime surveillance apparatus aimed at Americans whose only offense is disagreeing with this administration.”
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