One 12 months out of school and with no obvious nationwide safety experience, Thomas Fugate is the Division of Homeland Safety official tasked with overseeing the federal government’s essential hub for combating violent extremism.
By Hannah Allam for ProPublica
When Thomas Fugate graduated from faculty final 12 months with a level in politics, he celebrated in a social media put up concerning the thrilling alternatives that lay past campus life in Texas. “Onward and upward!” he wrote, with an emoji of a rocket capturing into house.
His profession blastoff got here rapidly. A 12 months after commencement, the 22-year-old with no obvious nationwide safety experience is now a Division of Homeland Safety official overseeing the federal government’s essential hub for terrorism prevention, together with an $18 million grant program meant to assist communities fight violent extremism.
The White Home appointed Fugate, a former Trump marketing campaign employee who interned on the hard-right Heritage Basis, to a Homeland Safety function that was expanded to incorporate the Heart for Prevention Applications and Partnerships. Often known as CP3, the workplace has led nationwide efforts to forestall hate-fueled assaults, faculty shootings and different types of focused violence.
Fugate’s appointment is the most recent shock for an workplace that has been decimated since President Donald Trump returned to the White Home and started remaking nationwide safety to offer it a laser concentrate on immigration.
Information of the appointment has trickled out in latest weeks, elevating alarm amongst counterterrorism researchers and nonprofit teams funded by CP3. A number of stated they turned to LinkedIn for intel on Fugate — an unknown of their subject — and have been surprised to see a photograph of “a college kid” with a flag pin on his lapel posing with a sharply arched eyebrow. No menace prevention expertise is listed in his employment historical past.
Usually, individuals conversant in CP3 say, a candidate that inexperienced wouldn’t have gotten an interview for a junior place, a lot much less be employed to run operations. In accordance with LinkedIn, the majority of Fugate’s management expertise comes from having served as secretary basic of a Mannequin United Nations membership.
“Maybe he’s a wunderkind. Maybe he’s Doogie Howser and has everything at 21 years old, or whatever he is, to lead the office. But that’s not likely the case,” stated one counterterrorism researcher who has labored with CP3 officers for years. “It sounds like putting the intern in charge.”
Prior to now seven weeks, at the very least 5 high-profile focused assaults have unfolded throughout the U.S., together with a automobile bombing in California and the gunning down of two Israeli Embassy aides in Washington. In opposition to this backdrop, present and former nationwide safety officers say, the Trump administration’s choice to shift counterterrorism assets to immigration and depart the violence-prevention portfolio to inexperienced appointees is “reckless.”
“We’re entering very dangerous territory,” one longtime U.S. counterterrorism official stated.
The destiny of CP3 is one instance of the fallout from deep cuts which have eradicated public well being and violence-prevention initiatives throughout federal companies.
The once-bustling workplace of round 80 workers now has fewer than 20, former staffers say. Grant work stops, then restarts. One senior civil servant was reassigned to the Federal Emergency Administration Company through an e mail that arrived late on a Saturday.
The workplace’s mission has modified in a single day, with a pivot away from specializing in home extremism, particularly far-right actions. The “terrorism” class that framed the company’s work for years was abruptly expanded to incorporate drug cartels, a part of what DHS staffers name an overarching message that border safety is the one mission that issues. In the meantime, the Trump administration has largely left terrorism prevention to the states.
ProPublica despatched DHS an in depth checklist of questions on Fugate’s place, his lack of nationwide safety expertise and the way forward for the division’s prevention work. A senior company official replied with an announcement saying solely that Fugate’s CP3 duties have been added to his function as an aide in an Immigration & Border Safety workplace.
“Due to his success, he has been temporarily given additional leadership responsibilities in the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships office,” the official wrote in an e mail. “This is a credit to his work ethic and success on the job.”
ProPublica sought an interview with Fugate by means of DHS and the White Home, however there was no response.
The Trump administration rejects claims of a retreat from terrorism prevention, noting partnerships with regulation enforcement companies and swift investigations of latest assaults. “The notion that this single office is responsible for preventing terrorism is not only incorrect, it’s ignorant,” spokesperson Abigail Jackson wrote in an e mail.
By intermediaries, ProPublica sought to talk with CP3 workers however acquired no reply. Speaking is dangerous; tales abound of Homeland Safety personnel present process lie-detector assessments in leak investigations, as Secretary Kristi Noem pledged in March.
Accounts of Fugate’s arrival and the dismantling of CP3 come from present and former Homeland Safety personnel, grant recipients and terrorism-prevention advocates who work intently with the workplace and have at occasions been confidants for distraught staffers. All spoke on situation of anonymity for concern of reprisal from the Trump administration.
In these circles, two essential theories have emerged to clarify Fugate’s uncommon ascent. One is that the Trump administration rewarded a Gen Z marketing campaign employee with a resume-boosting title that comes with little actual energy as a result of the workplace is in shambles.
The opposite is that the White Home put in Fugate to supervise a pivot away from conventional counterterrorism lanes and to steer assets towards MAGA-friendly sheriffs and border safety initiatives earlier than ultimately shuttering operations. On this state of affairs, Fugate was described as “a minder” and “a babysitter.”
DHS didn’t handle a ProPublica query about this characterization.
Rising MAGA Star
The CP3 homepage boasts concerning the workplace’s consultants in disciplines together with emergency administration, counterterrorism, public well being and social work.
Fugate brings a unique qualification prized by the White Home: loyalty to the president.
On Instagram, Fugate traced his political awakening to 9 years in the past, when as a 13-year-old “in a generation deprived of hope, opportunity, and happiness, I saw in one man the capacity for real and lasting change: Donald Trump.”
Fugate is a self-described “Trumplican” who interned for state lawmakers in Austin earlier than graduating magna cum laude a 12 months in the past with a level in politics and regulation from the College of Texas at San Antonio. Instagram pictures and different public data from the previous 12 months chronicle his lightning-fast rise in Trump world.
Beginning in Could 2024, pictures present a newly graduated Fugate at a Texas GOP gathering launching his first marketing campaign, a bid for a delegate spot on the Republican Nationwide Conference in Milwaukee. He handed out gummy sweet and a flier with a photograph of him in a tuxedo at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property. Fugate gained an alternate slot.
The following month, he was in Florida celebrating Trump’s 78th birthday with the Membership 47 fan group in West Palm Seaside. “I truly wish I could say more about what I’m doing, but more to come soon!” he wrote in a caption, with a smiley emoji in sun shades.
Posts within the run-up to the election present Fugate spending a number of weeks in Washington, a time he referred to as “surreal and invigorating.” In July, he attended the Republican conference, sporting the Texas delegation’s signature cowboy hat in pictures with MAGA luminaries corresponding to former Cupboard Secretary Ben Carson and then-Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.).
By late summer season, Fugate was posting from the marketing campaign path as a part of Trump’s advance workforce, pictured at one cease standing behind the candidate in a crowd of younger supporters. When Trump gained the election, Fugate marked the second with an emotional put up about believing in him “from the very start, even to the scorn and contempt of my peers.”
“Working alongside a dedicated, driven group of folks, we faced every challenge head-on and, together, celebrated a victorious outcome,” Fugate wrote on Instagram.
In February, the White Home appointed Fugate as a “special assistant” assigned to an immigration workplace at Homeland Safety. He assumed management of CP3 final month to fill a emptiness left by earlier Director Invoice Braniff, an Military veteran with greater than 20 years of nationwide safety expertise who resigned in March when the administration started chopping his workers.
In his closing weeks as director, Braniff had publicly defended the workplace’s achievements, noting the dispersal of almost $90 million since 2020 to assist communities fight extremist violence. In accordance with the workplace’s 2024 report back to Congress, in recent times CP3 grant cash was utilized in greater than 1,100 efforts to establish violent extremism on the neighborhood stage and interrupt the radicalization course of.
“CP3 is the inheritor of the primary and founding mission of DHS — to prevent terrorism,” Braniff wrote on LinkedIn when he introduced his resignation.
In conversations with colleagues, CP3 staffers have expressed shock at how little Fugate is aware of concerning the fundamentals of his function and likened conferences with him to “career counseling.” DHS didn’t handle questions on his stage of expertise.
One grant recipient referred to as Fugate’s appointment “an insult” to Braniff and a setback within the transfer towards evidence-based approaches to terrorism prevention, a subject nonetheless reckoning with post-9/11 work that was unscientific and stigmatizing to Muslims.
“They really started to shift the conversation and shift the public thinking. It was starting to get to the root of the problem,” the grantee stated. “Now that’s all gone.”
Critics of Fugate’s appointment stress that their anger isn’t directed at an aspiring politico having fun with a whirlwind entry to Washington. The issue, they are saying, is the administration’s seemingly cavalier therapy of an workplace that was funding work on pressing nationwide safety considerations.
“The big story here is the undermining of democratic institutions,” a former Homeland Safety official stated. “Who’s going to volunteer to be the next civil servant if they think their supervisor is an apparatchik?”
Season of Assaults
Spring introduced a burst of extremist violence, a development analysts concern might lengthen into the summer season given infected political tensions and the disarray of federal companies tasked with monitoring threats.
In April, an arson assault focused Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, who blamed the breach on “security failures.” 4 days later, a mass shooter stormed onto the Florida State College campus, killing two and wounding six others. The alleged attacker had espoused white supremacist views and used Hitler as a profile image for a gaming account.
Assaults continued in Could with the obvious automobile bombing of a fertility clinic in California. The suspected assailant, the one fatality, left a screed detailing violent beliefs in opposition to life and procreation. Just a few days later, on Could 21, a gunman allegedly radicalized by the warfare in Gaza killed two Israeli Embassy aides outdoors a Jewish museum in Washington.
Associated | How Trump has left the battle in opposition to extremist violence to the states
June opened with a firebombing assault in Colorado that wounded 12, together with a Holocaust survivor, at a gathering calling for the discharge of Israeli hostages. The suspect’s prices embrace a federal hate crime.
If assaults proceed at that tempo, warn present and former nationwide safety officers, cracks will start to seem within the nation’s pared-down counterterrorism sector.
“If you cut the staff and there are major attacks that lead to a reconsideration, you can’t scale up staff once they’re fired,” stated the U.S. counterterrorism official, who opposes the administration’s shift away from prevention.
Contradictory alerts are popping out of Homeland Safety about the way forward for CP3 work, particularly the grant program. Staffers have instructed companions within the advocacy world that Fugate plans to roll out one other funding cycle quickly. The CP3 web site nonetheless touts this system as the one federal grant “solely dedicated to helping local communities develop and strengthen their capabilities” in opposition to terrorism and focused violence.
However Homeland Safety’s price range proposal to Congress for the following fiscal 12 months suggests a bleaker future. The division really useful eliminating the threat-prevention grant program, explaining that it “does not align with DHS priorities.”
The previous Homeland Safety official stated the choice “means that the department founded to prevent terrorism in the United States no longer prioritizes preventing terrorism in the United States.”
