By Steve Neavling
The FBI has reduced staffing in its Domestic Terrorism Operations Section and ended the use of a tagging system used to track such cases, raising concerns that investigations into white supremacists and anti-government extremists could suffer, according to multiple sources familiar with the changes, Reuters first reported.
Roughly 16 employees were recently reassigned from the section, which supports field offices across the country. Some senior officials have discussed shutting it down entirely, though no final decision has been made. The bureau also discontinued a system for flagging cases with domestic terrorism links, an internal tool used to track trends and monitor threats nationwide.
The changes come under FBI Director Kash Patel, a Trump appointee and longtime critic of the bureau’s focus on far-right violence. Critics say the shift signals a deprioritization of domestic extremism, despite repeated warnings from national security officials that homegrown threats, particularly from white supremacists and militias, remain among the most serious facing the country.
“There’s a real effort to steer resources away from this fight,” said Jacob Ware, a domestic terrorism expert at the Council on Foreign Relations.
The FBI declined to address the staffing cuts directly but said it remains committed to protecting the public from a range of threats, including terrorism.
The moves also follow the Trump administration’s directive for Joint Terrorism Task Forces to support immigration enforcement and its decision to pardon most people charged in the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, including leaders of far-right groups.
The FBI had significantly ramped up domestic terrorism investigations after Jan. 6 and the 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville. As of 2023, it had about 2,700 open cases, half linked to the Capitol riot.
Patel and other Trump allies have claimed the bureau targeted conservatives for political reasons, and some former FBI agents told Congress last year that they were pressured to inflate domestic terrorism numbers, an allegation that FBI officials have denied.
