U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration cut funding on Tuesday to a national database run by the University of Maryland that tracks domestic terrorism, hate crimes and school shootings.
The database was terminated after Trump cancelled nearly $20 million of funding for 24 projects — including the Terrorism and Targeted Violence database — related to violence prevention, according to a Tuesday report by The Washington Post.
The database, created in February by this university’s National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, tracked events across the country such as hate crimes, school shootings and instances of workplace violence.
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The database was the “only publicly available source of information” that allowed stakeholders, including law enforcement officers and policymakers, to analyze the scope and nature of domestic terrorism, START research director and the database’s principal investigator Michael Jensen wrote in a statement on Tuesday.
The START consortium created the database project in response to a congressional mandate that required the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to collect data on terrorism and targeted violence. The database was supported by $3 million from the department, according to The Washington Post’s report.
This university will appeal the department’s decision to terminate the project, Jensen wrote in the statement that replaced the database on the consortium’s website.
Several days before Jensen’s team received notice of the project’s termination, they had identified a 25 percent increase in terrorism and targeted violence threats in the first two months of 2025 compared to the same time last year, according to the statement.
The database produced other findings, including how the U.S. experienced more than 1,800 terrorism and targeted violence events in 2023 and 2024 — about three daily, according to Jensen.
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Because of the database’s termination, Jensen wrote, the project’s team can no longer hold quarterly webinars with the homeland security department and its partners about the evolving nature of domestic terrorism.
The team also cannot use the data to train more than 15,000 law enforcement officers on the contemporary threat landscape, Jensen added.
“We are greatly concerned about what this means for public safety moving forward,” Jensen wrote.
