As currently practiced in the United States, targeted violence and terrorism prevention draws more from the research and experience of the public health violence prevention community than it does from post 9/11 Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) initiatives. On this anniversary of 9/11, it is important nonetheless to document the learning process that the federal government, including but not limited to the Department of Homeland Security, went through to arrive at the public health-informed approach to prevention that has increasingly become doctrinal for the terrorism prevention community in the United States.
The Department of Homeland Security was founded after September 11, 2001, through the Homeland Security Act of 20021. The legislation begins by listing six general missions for the newly minted department, the first three of which are specific to terrorism:
Mission 1a of the Department of Homeland Security is to prevent terrorism within the United States; a simple-sounding mission but one that has proven to be more complicated in practice. Mission 1b is consistent with doctrinal understanding of anti-terrorism measures and a layered defense; making the homeland a harder target with fewer vulnerabilities by protecting borders and critical infrastructure. Mission 1c acknowledges that terrorist attacks will still occur, and therefore instructs the Department to blunt future attacks by investing in “preparedness” – those measures that enhance resilience, response and recovery.
It is essential to note that the word “counterterrorism” appears in the legislation exactly twice, referring to DHS Science and Technology’s role in research and development for “equipment for particular use in counterterrorism including devices and technologies to disable terrorism devices” and to the DHS Inspector Generals’ ability to access sensitive information about “intelligence, counterintelligence, or counterterrorism matters.” In no part of the legislation is the Department of Homeland Security given a traditional, operational counterterrorism mandate, and in fact, DHS does not play a lead role in traditional counterterrorism disruptions. And yet mission 1a of the Department is “to prevent terrorist attacks in the United States.” It would take over twenty years for the Department to understand how to realize that foundational mission, and to then walk away from it.
Prevention Abroad Under the Bush Administration
The U.S. foray into prevention started from the inspired leadership of the National Security Council during the George W. Bush Presidency in the year immediately following the 9/11 attacks. While many assume that prevention efforts both domestically and abroad have been championed by Democratic administrations, prevention has generally been a bi-partisan effort with vocal detractors on both sides of the aisle. In her book, How We Win, author and former senior official, Farah Pandith, describes the Administration’s efforts to engage civil society in the Muslim world to push back on the appeal of al Qaeda’s violent ideology, and especially among disempowered young people. U.S led wars in Afghanistan, and then Iraq during the Bush Administration, and follow-on counterterrorism operations against al Qaeda’s global affiliates over the following years in Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, and Southeast Asia would ultimately speak more loudly than U.S. diplomacy.
The Early Role of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties in Prevention at Home (2003-2009)
The Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CRCL) was also created by the Homeland Security Act of 2002. CRCL was established to support the broad DHS mission of securing the homeland while preserving liberty, fairness and equality under the law and to ensure that civil rights and civil liberties were built into all DHS activities. As part of its efforts to share information, hear and address community concerns, and receive feedback about the impacts of DHS policies and procedures, CRCL brought together federal, state and local government officials and diverse community groups in Community Roundtables. During this time, these Community Roundtables were conducted in over 10 cities across the United States, selected because of their diversity and because communities in those cities were connected to the Middle East and North Africa and were therefore most directly impacted by U.S. reactions to the 9/11 attacks.
CRCL also worked with the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) to create and deliver a Community Awareness Briefing (CAB) designed to help communities and law enforcement understand al Qaeda-inspired recruitment tactics and explore ways to address relevant issues at the local level.
CVE Origins (2009-2011)
While CRCL conducted Community Relations Roundtables and CABs in cities nationwide, the first proactive “countering violent extremism” (CVE) efforts were driven by continued concerns over al Qaeda’s decentralization and adoption of increasingly effective social media efforts to recruit, radicalize and inspire homegrown violent extremists (HVEs) to carry out attacks in the United States, such as the 2009 Fort Hood attack and the 2010 attempted Times Square bombing. In December 2010, the National Engagement Task Force, which was co-led by DHS and the Department of Justice (DOJ), began to coordinate community engagement efforts, disseminating best practices to field-based federal components and providing a mechanism through which relevant components could communicate and coordinate. These efforts were energized in 2011 when the Obama Administration issued its first national-level strategy for CVE.
2011 White House Strategy and Strategic Implementation Plan (2011-2013)
The Obama Administration identified the need for a prevention-focused approach to counterterrorism efforts. For several years, foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs) had been actively recruiting Americans to either join efforts overseas or carry out violent attacks in the homeland. Although FTOs previously focused on training attackers overseas, these groups shifted to actively recruiting disenfranchised younger Americans in hopes they would carry out attacks in the United States. The Administration wanted to put mechanisms in place to identify and prevent these individuals from radicalizing and mobilizing to violence as early as possible.
In 2011, President Obama unveiled the National Strategy for Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism in the United States (aka., the White House CVE Strategy), which rhetorically, if not from a resource standpoint, put CVE at the forefront of the government’s counterterrorism strategy for the first time. The first objective of the 2011 strategy was “enhancing federal engagement with and support to local communities targeted by violent extremists.” Research was the second objective of the strategy, for the purposes of developing training for communities and government “about how people are radicalized to accept violence, and what has worked to prevent violent extremism.” The third and final goal was to develop methods to counter internet propaganda promoting violent extremism. This included monitoring social networking sites advancing violent extremist narratives and refuting their messages. The approach charted new territory by including prevention as an additional tool in the fight against terrorism. However, it also faced criticism as community and civil rights groups expressed concerns about a disproportionate focus on actions that “at-risk communities” should take to enhance engagement with law enforcement and the federal government, rather than efforts to address the perpetrators of these rare acts of HVE violence. Additionally, critics noted that the strategy focused too narrowly on international terrorism, and that initiatives were inadequately funded.
The White House CVE Strategy was followed by a Strategic Implementation Plan for Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism in the United States (2011 SIP). The 2011 SIP identified federal departments and agencies to carry out 44 specific tasks intended to develop or increase CVE community engagement, capacity building, and research and training efforts. These departments and agencies, including DHS, DOJ, the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), and NCTC – known as the “Group of Four” – worked with the National Engagement Task Force as appropriate. Ultimately, having the Group of Four as co-leads caused coordination challenges and highlighted the need for a single lead.
That same year, DHS created the position of CVE Coordinator to coordinate DHS efforts internally and externally among the Group of Four, and to implement the White House CVE Strategy and the SIP. Also in 2011, DHS’s National Protection and Programs Directorate (NPPD) responded to a request from the Mayor of Los Angeles by placing a permanent outreach lead in the city, tasked with building ongoing trust with communities and establishing CVE programs.
CVE Pilot Period and the 2015 White House CVE Summit (2013-2015)
The need to implement the activities outlined in the SIP was exacerbated by rising concern over foreign fighters and propaganda efforts associated with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in 2014. In September 2014, DOJ launched a series of pilot programs in partnership with the White House, DHS and NCTC in three major regional metropolitan areas: Boston, Los Angeles, and the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. These cities were chosen in part based on their investments in community engagement. Led by local U.S. Attorneys in Minneapolis and Boston and by the DHS lead in Los Angeles, these programs took guidance from the 2011 White House CVE Strategy to create local frameworks that they could present at a White House Summit, with the intent that other cities would create similar frameworks. The effort faced challenges, including a lack of funding for framework implementation, a short period of time to establish the frameworks, a lack of long-term sustainability planning, and some local resistance to creating local frameworks with direction from the federal government.
In February 2015, the White House held a CVE Summit led by President Obama where state, local, federal and international stakeholders met to discuss CVE strategies and approaches, including the work of the pilot cities. The summit also marked the establishment of the DHS Office for Community Partnerships (OCP), which directly reported to the Secretary of Homeland Security. OCP was charged with countering violent extremism, building community partnerships and trust, and finding ways to support communities that were taking action. OCP issued its own CVE Strategy in 2016 (2016 DHS CVE Strategy).
Following the Summit, NCTC issued $130,000 to each pilot city via DOJ and DHS to serve as seed funding to start local intervention initiatives, but no long-term funding followed.
While the CVE Summit helped spur the creation of frameworks, partners in these cities expressed concern with the approach of having this work directed from Washington, D.C. While the Group of Four would regularly try to provide support by advising on frameworks and deliverables CABs and Community Resilience Exercises (CREX), it was difficult to build ongoing trust or sustainable programming with a few site visits a year. DHS OCP, therefore, pushed to expand its field presence beyond Los Angeles, with the idea that DHS needed a regional approach to CVE.
In November 2015, DHS created another field position in Denver, Colorado, selected because of a close partnership with the U.S. Attorney’s Office there. The Group of Four had partnered closely over 2015 with that office, which wanted to create a local prevention framework following an attempt made by three teenage girls to join ISIS a year earlier.
From 2015-2017, DHS also supported the Peer to Peer: Challenging Extremism (P2P) program, which was sponsored by Facebook. This initiative engaged university students around the globe to develop online campaigns against violent extremism. The competition had over 10,000 student participants from over 350 universities in more than 70 countries and 40 U.S. states. P2P generated over 75 million impressions – a measure used to quantify the number of digital view or engagements with a piece of content – and earned over 500 pieces of national and international press.
The CVE Task Force (2016-2017)
In January 2016, DHS and DOJ announced the establishment of a permanent interagency CVE Task Force to better facilitate coordination between the Group of Four and to foster more communication with Health and Human Services (HHS) and other agencies that had not yet been involved in CVE work. The CVE Task Force was housed administratively at DHS, led by DHS and DOJ, and staffed with representatives from the FBI, NCTC, and other agencies. The CVE Task Force had four lines of effort:
- Research and Analysis: Engaged a monthly working group to share relevant research and analytical products, increase access to data, identify gaps, priorities and opportunities for collaboration, create an interagency process to control quality of training products, and ensure civil rights and civil liberties standards were upheld.
- Engagement and Technical Assistance: Maintained an Engagement Working Group to share promising practices, opportunities for partnerships, maintain an interagency engagement calendar, facilitate partnership between federal, state and local governments, and to implement quality control standards for capacity building training.
- Intervention: Provided briefings on established intervention teams around the country that led to the creation of intervention teams in additional cities. Provided technical assistance, consultation, and established an intervention working group with interagency representation.
- Communications and Digital Strategy: Developed the first-ever interagency website for federal CVE resources, launched the first Digital Forum on Terrorism Prevention in partnership with tech sector partners, drove private sector investment to prevention projects, and educated partners about marketing best practices for those running digital campaigns on terrorism prevention.
The CVE Task Force concluded at the end of FY2017, although interagency collaboration has continued informally and formally since that time.
2016 White House SIP
With support of the interagency, in October 2016, the White House issued an updated SIP. It focused on the implementation of 14 tasks, consolidated from 44 in the 2011 SIP, and aligned them with the four CVE Task Force lines of effort described above.
2016 Grants Program
The FY2016 Omnibus Appropriations Act allotted $10 million for the newly created DHS OCP and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (which administers DHS grants on behalf of the other DHS offices) “to help states and local communities prepare for, prevent, and respond to emergent threat from violent extremists.” State, local, and tribal governments, non-profit organizations, and institutions of higher education could apply to help support community-led prevention initiatives.
On January 13, 2017, DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson publicly announced the Department’s list of 31 CVE grant program award recipients. Two weeks later, the newly inaugurated Trump Administration postponed the issuance of funding as part of a review of all federal grant programs. In June 2017, DHS Secretary John Kelly announced a revised set of award recipients following the review. Secretary Kelly noted that the grantees were selected “in part because of their potential to support law enforcement and other frontline defenders, to demonstrate program effectiveness, and to use taxpayer resources efficiently to create independently sustainable programs.” Four groups that were awarded funding declined out of disagreement with the Administration’s approach. Ultimately, the $10 million of grant funding was awarded to 26 organizations for implementation of local initiatives.
Shift to Terrorism Prevention (2017-2019)
Some of the previous CVE efforts, while well-intentioned, proved ineffective by engendering mistrust and stigmatizing Muslim and Arab communities. In response to these and additional concerns from civil rights organizations, DHS made significant changes to its approach. DHS began gravitating towards a public health-informed model for violence prevention that the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), numerous academic experts, and practitioners have implemented and researched for decades. Special issues of the American Psychologist (2017) and Criminology and Public Policy (2020) represent examples of the growing scholarly literature supporting the core concepts upon with targeted violence and terrorism prevention now rests.
In November 2017 testimony to the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, DHS Acting Secretary Elaine Duke stated that the Department was rededicating itself to terrorism prevention. Secretary Duke announced that DHS was launching an end-to-end-review of all CVE programs, projects and activities, to ensure that the approach was “risk-based and intelligence driven, focused on effectiveness, and provides the appropriate support to those on the frontlines who we rely on to spot sign of terrorist activity,” and was flexible enough to address all forms of extremism, which she defined as “any ideologically motivated violence designed to coerce people or their governments.” DHS funded the RAND Corporation to complete the review, which culminated in a report published in 2019, titled Practical Terrorism Prevention: Reexamining U.S. National Approaches to Addressing the Threat of Ideologically Motivated Violence. In accordance with the shift to terrorism prevention, DHS announced the renaming and transition of OCP to the Office of Terrorism Prevention Partnerships (OTPP) on November 30, 2017, and moved the office from under the Office of the Secretary to sit within the DHS Office of Partnership and Engagement (OPE).
Tech Sector Engagement (2017-2021)
OTPP cultivated relationships with the tech sector through a series of Digital Forums on Terrorism Prevention. These events built the capacity of non-governmental responses to terrorist recruitment and radicalization to violence and brought together experts from tech companies, civil society and communities.
The Forums gained heightened visibility within and outside of the Department. DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen keynoted the second Digital Forum in Silicon Valley with United Kingdom Home Secretary Amber Rudd in February 2017, and DHS Under Secretary Chad Wolf keynoted the fourth event in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. During the COVID-19 pandemic, DHS held 7 Digital Forums as online events.
The 2018 National Counterterrorism Strategy
On the heels of the 2017 National Security Strategy, which noted “U.S. intelligence and homeland security experts will work with law enforcement and civic leaders on terrorism prevention and provide accurate and actionable information about radicalization in their communities,” the 2018 National Counterterrorism Strategy offered more specificity about the newly reemerging term of prevention. The 2018 strategy stated that it “prioritizes a broad range of non-military capabilities, such as our ability to prevent and intervene in terrorism recruitment, minimize the appeal of terrorist propaganda online, and build societal resilience to terrorism.”
The strategy emphasized the importance of prevention as part of the broader counterterrorism mission, specifically outlining the need to:
- Institutionalize a prevention architecture to thwart terrorism;
- Combat violent extremist ideologies;
- Increase civil society’s role in terrorism prevention;
- Support intervention, reintegration, and counter-recidivism efforts;
- Combat terrorists’ influence online; and
- Counter radicalization through strategic communications.
Office of Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention (2019-2021)
On April 19, 2019, DHS Acting Secretary Kevin McAleenan announced the transition of OTPP to the Office of Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention (OTVP). This rebranding widened the scope of previous DHS efforts to ensure that all forms of violence, regardless of ideological motivation, were being addressed. The office moved again within DHS, from OPE to the Office of Strategy, Policy and Plans (PLCY), and was directed to coordinate and expand on the broad range of prevention activities being carried out across DHS, including grants, community and law enforcement awareness briefings, threat assessments, and information sharing.
The expansion into the ‘targeted violence’ prevention mission grew from the experiences of the attacks that often lacked a clearly discernible political or ideological motive (e.g., the 2017 Las Vegas shooting) and therefore fell outside of the traditional definitions of terrorism. Targeted violence may be the result of perceived personal grievances, hate, or ideology, and can occur in schools, workplaces, and public spaces as well as places that serve as symbolic targets.
2019 DHS Strategic Framework for Countering Terrorism and Targeted Violence
In September 2019, DHS released its Strategic Framework for Countering Terrorism and Targeted Violence (Strategic Framework), which, for the first time in national-level strategy, explicitly stated that terrorism and targeted violence overlap, intersect, and interact as problems, and that they necessitate a shared set of solutions. The Strategic Framework described a comprehensive treatment of preventative tools, including increasing societal awareness, building trust through engagement and exercises, countering terrorist influence online, and developing prevention frameworks with local partners. OTVP’s programs and initiatives were aligned with Goal #3 of the Strategic Framework.
Publication of the Strategic Framework helped precipitate the re-launch of the grant program for the first time in four years. The FY 2020 TVTP Grant Program prioritized establishing and enhancing local prevention frameworks with an emphasis on threat assessment and management capabilities, in addition to traditional domestic terrorism prevention.
Field Staff Expansion and the Local Prevention Framework Model
Likewise, the Strategic Framework set a foundation for the 2020 expansion of the OTVP Regional Prevention Coordinators (i.e., Field Staff) to additional locations to support the development of new local prevention frameworks with state, local, tribal and territorial (SLTT) partners, and enhance their ability to identify and respond to individuals at risk of mobilizing to violence. The focus on locally based prevention was intentional because each community is unique, with different resources, demographics, infrastructure, political climates, and local needs. The flexible local prevention framework model was intended to connect all segments of society, mainly through public awareness and engagement, threat assessment and threat management, and support services. The role of field staff was to deliver educational and technical support to advance these concepts.
Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships (2021-2025)
The prevention office at DHS underwent further change when DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced the creation of the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships (CP3). With the transition of OTVP to CP3, the Department sought to codify its adoption of a public health-informed model of violence prevention and take further, decisive steps away from earlier CVE efforts. In response to earlier criticisms, DHS made significant changes to its approach, including drawing a clear distinction between prevention and traditional counterterrorism activities. DHS reaffirmed its commitment to transparency through ongoing engagement with civil rights, civil liberties and community organizations. As former Assistant Secretary for Counterterrorism and Threat Prevention, John Cohen, highlighted in 2021, “while 2014 CVE efforts appeared successful, we only later learned that many stakeholders felt maligned or unfairly targeted by the CVE approach. So, while prevention remains the goal, we have now shifted to a more informed, public health infused, whole-of-society approach that seeks to address concerns from all forms of targeted violence and terrorism that can originate from seemingly anywhere.”
CP3 drafted and implemented a new internal strategy to advance the public health-informed approach to targeted violence and terrorism prevention between 2021 and 2024. CP3 hired mental health professionals, social workers, trauma-informed youth counselors, public health practitioners, primary care physicians, and experts in behavioral threat assessment and threat management to complement its team of public safety and terrorism prevention experts. CP3 engaged in an aggressive professional development agenda to internalize the lessons learned from the public health violence prevention community about how to mitigate the risk factors for violence and enhance protective factors against violence across all levels of the social ecology (individual, relationship, family, community, society), and according to the different levels of prevention (primordial, primary, secondary and tertiary). CP3 adopted the vocabulary of the public health violence prevention community while continuing to engage heavily with the public safety community. The results were significant.
As reported to Congress, between FY2021 and FY2024, CP3’s Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention Grant Program funded grantees that conducted 1,172 multidisciplinary interventions for individuals who had exhibited behavioral risk factors for violence, ranging from individuals who threatened school shootings, to domestic terrorism, to hate crime, to terrorism in support of foreign terrorist organizations. In 93.5% of the interventions, the individual in question got access to help in the form of mental health, behavioral health, social services, or other supportive services. In 6.5% of the instances, the individuals had already broken the law or were exhibiting an imminent and likely threat of violence and were referred to law enforcement. Building on lessons learned since 2002, CP3 was fostering prevention programs that worked across the spectrum of targeted violence, that protected privacy, civil rights and civil liberties, that supporting individuals on the path to violence with non-punitive interventions before they engaged in criminal behavior, and that also ensured public safety in the instance of a true threat.
Between FY2023 and FY2024, the number of public safety organizations applying for grants increased by over 100%, at the same time as the number of public health organizations applying for a grant increased by over 1000%. In FY24, the TVTP Grant Program received $99 million of eligible grant proposals for an $18 million grant pool. At the same time, the number of state governments lining up to work with CP3 to establish state-level targeted violence and terrorism prevention strategies skyrocketed. By December 2024, 8 states had published a state-level prevention strategy, 8 were in the process of drafting their strategies, and 27 states were in the queue to work with CP3 to adopt a public-health informed state prevention strategy. Terrorism prevention was being normalized in the United States, and the public health-informed approach to targeted violence and terrorism was becoming doctrinal.
This successful proof of concept did not belong to CP3 alone. It was the result of years of research funded by DHS Science and Technology and the Department of Justice’s National Institute of Justice – research which led to the adoption of the public health-informed approach to violence prevention in the first place. Of course, the underlying evidence-based was created by decades of research and practice enabled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other public health entities in the United States. The capacity building work of CP3 was based on the technical expertise of the National Threat Evaluation and Reporting (NTER) Program Office housed within DHS Intelligence and Analysis. Their Master Trainer Program for behavioral threat assessment and management (BTAM) allowed for the proliferations of BTAM trainers across the country, and BTAM became the centerpiece of state and local targeted violence and terrorism prevention efforts. CP3’s success with local capacity building and partnerships with non-governmental organizations and universities was honed by the experiences of CRCL, OCP, and OPE since 2002.
Conclusion
As this article demonstrates, the history of terrorism prevention in the United States since 9/11 has been tumultuous. Critics will highlight the shortcomings of CVE and the parade of new strategies and offices as evidence of a doomed enterprise, and champions will recognize the same iterative evolution of prevention as innovation that lead to the adoption of a novel, effective and cost-effective paradigm for realizing mission 1a of the Department of Homeland Security – to prevent terrorism.
CP3 has been dismantled along with many other offices across the Federal Government in the past seven months, but it and its predecessors, along with its many partners inside and outside of DHS, have demonstrated a doctrinal proof of concept to prevent targeted violence and terrorism. When the time comes, civil servants will rebuild that capability and turn the tide on targeted violence and terrorism in the United States. In the interim, state and local governments and civil society must step up.
Reference
1 Referenced from the Department of Homeland Security’s website on 9/10/2025 here: Homeland Security Act 2002, Public Law 107-296