The Department Created To Stop Another 9/11 May No Longer Be Equipped For Counterterrorism Work

The Trump administration has fundamentally reshaped the Department of Homeland Security since taking office 19 months ago, so much so that the agency created to prevent the next 9/11 is doing little counterterrorism work.

DHS is now almost entirely focused on apprehending unauthorized immigrants, having cut many staffers that worked on issues ranging from protecting against hackers to intelligence analysis, and reassigned counterterrorism investigators and others to work on deportations.

As a result, DHS is less equipped to respond to threats against the United States than just a few years ago, according to people familiar with its operations and former officials still in touch with those inside the agency.

“Are we safer now than we were pre-9/11 from the kind of attack that 9/11 was? I would say yes,” said Janet Napolitano, who served as former President Barack Obama’s Homeland Security secretary. “Are we as safe and secure as we could be if DHS were properly led and was really putting its resources where risks really were and where risks are evolving? No.”

Napolitano pointed in particular to DHS’s remit to identify a range of threats and to help Americans recover if disaster strikes.

“Those elements of DHS have been under incredible stress in the last two years as resources have been poured into immigration enforcement,” she said.

POLITICO spoke with 10 lawmakers and former and current U.S. officials familiar with the Department of Homeland Security. Many voiced concerns about DHS’s readiness given the changes made since Trump took office in January 2025. And while those individual moves have been publicly reported, some argued that it has only recently become clear the extent to which the department has abandoned traditional counterterrorism efforts.

Republicans largely defended the department, but some still had critiques of DHS cuts at a number of agencies tasked with preventing or responding to attacks against the homeland.

“The answer is not to essentially slash their personnel and budgets and then have them do nothing. Because they do have a mission,” said Chad Wolf, who served as acting Homeland Security secretary during the first Trump administration. “You’ve got to have good leadership there that keeps them on mission and is fulfilling the direction that the president and the administration wants to go.”

DHS defended its approach to counterterrorism in a statement, arguing that “counterterrorism and immigration enforcement go hand in hand.”

“Child exploitation, trafficking, terrorism, scams, and smuggling all have a nexus to illegal immigration,” DHS said. “Despite multiple Democrat shutdowns of DHS, the Department is more than equipped to keep Americans safe in an ever-changing threat landscape. DHS has been recruiting, reforming and modernizing at a record pace — including in areas of counterterrorism.”

White House spokesperson Lauren Bis claimed that the Trump administration has detained thousands of known or suspected terrorists and also accused former President Joe Biden of allowing the entry of potential terrorists in the United States.

“President Trump unleashed ICE and federal law enforcement to target the worst of the worst including national security threats, terrorists, and violent criminals,” Bis said.

Threats against the U.S. have shifted in the two decades since al-Qaida militants hijacked four commercial airliners and crashed them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, killing 2,977 people. While al-Qaida and other Islamist groups continue to inspire isolated attacks against the U.S., cyberattacks, drone strikes and the operations of transnational criminal organizations are now often seen as more critical and imminent threats to national security.

While there are many in Washington that argue that DHS hasn’t adapted quickly enough, some of the efforts it had been making in that direction have now been curtailed.

Fewer people guarding against hacks and AI intrusions

That’s clearest with the cuts to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which was created in 2018 to combat digital threats from hacking groups and foreign adversaries. At least 1,000 CISA staffers have left the agency since Trump took office.

While Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin is working to reverse some of the sweeping cuts, CISA may have difficulty staffing up quickly, at a time when both Republicans and Democrats have flagged the need for it to help the U.S. respond to the threats posed by advanced artificial intelligence models.

Republicans, among them moderates like House Homeland Security Chair Andrew Garbarino (R-N.Y.) and Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), are leading a push to resuscitate CISA, but the damage may be long lasting, per one current CISA official.

“When experienced personnel leave, the agency also loses institutional knowledge, technical expertise and trusted relationships with federal agencies, private sector partners and international counterparts that often take years to build,” said the official, granted anonymity to speak about sensitive readiness concerns. “It inevitably increases the likelihood that the government will be slower to identify, coordinate around and respond to significant cyber threats, and that leaves the country more exposed.”

For its part, DHS insisted that CISA under Mullin “is focused squarely on executing its statutory mission: serving as the national coordinator for securing and protecting the nation’s critical infrastructure.”

“We are committed to delivering timely, actionable cyber threat intelligence, supporting federal, state and local partners, and defending against both nation-state and criminal cyber threats,” the department said.

Investigators become immigration officers

At the same time, the Trump administration has shifted the responsibilities of many DHS staffers across the department to immigration enforcement. For the first time in history, personnel from nondeportation sections of DHS, including its intelligence arm and the arm of Immigration and Customs Enforcement that focuses on criminal investigations are now assisting with the apprehension, detention and removal of unauthorized immigrants in the United States.

Hundreds of agents at Homeland Security Investigations, which is part of ICE but handles complex criminal investigations including counterfeiting, cybercrime and terrorism, have been detailed to the Enforcement and Removal Operations arm of ICE to help apprehend unauthorized immigrants.

While HSI only accounts for a small percentage of total federal personnel working on counterterrorism, it has an outsize impact on federal counterterrorism efforts. In the most recent ICE annual report, released in December 2024 — before Trump took office, ICE said that HSI initiated more than 400 counterterrorism investigations between October 2023 and September 2024 and contributed to 93 percent of the U.S. Joint Terrorism Task Force’s “efforts” against terrorist activity in the same time period.

ICE has not published an annual report accounting for investigative work that occurred between October 2024 and September 2025, making it difficult to exactly measure the impact of Trump’s redirection of HSI agents. But the risk of gaps is high.

“You take your eye off the ball, certain things are going to be missed. Certain things are going to escape our attention,” said Jeh Johnson, who served as Homeland Security secretary from 2015 to 2017 under the Obama administration, referring to the changes at HSI.

That said, the expanded immigration enforcement push has its defenders. Mark Krikorian, who leads the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington think tank that favors restrictions on legal immigration as well as more immigration enforcement, argued that deploying HSI to these investigations is more important than some of the agency’s other tasks — namely customs enforcement.

“If terrorists can’t get in, they can’t embed themselves and they can’t stay here and plan,” Krikorian said. “In the real world you’ve got to choose and make decisions. It’s OK if some counterfeit Gucci bags get into people’s hands because HSI is investigating human smuggling rings.”

FEMA in the crosshairs

While DHS’s FEMA agency is less clearly a counterterrorism tool, cuts there have throttled the dispersal of counterterrorism grants to states, cities and Native American tribes (most DHS grants are distributed via FEMA’s contracting authority). FEMA also coordinates the responses to any terror attack. It supported search-and-rescue operations and the clean up of Ground Zero in the days after the 9/11 attacks.

Some 6,000 FEMA staffers were cut since Trump took office, leaving the agency critically understaffed as it responds to the more typical emergencies it addresses, including natural disasters. A terrorist attack would likely only strain resources further at the still-embattled agency.

DHS said that FEMA has added 1,275 staffers back over the past few months and that FEMA is prepared to address any “future events.”

“To ensure seamless continuity of operations, the agency maintains a roster of highly accomplished career and acting personnel across all headquarters and regional offices — ensuring no position is left without experienced leadership,” DHS said.

Agencies still hurting from early cuts

Former Secretary Kristi Noem also gutted the Office of Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction in 2025, halving the office’s staff. That is the office that prevents attacks against the U.S. using chemical, biological or nuclear weapons and trains local, state and tribal officials on how to respond to potential threats.

It has not re-hired any staff, unlike some other agencies, and neither Mullin nor other administration officials have said they have any plans to reinvest in it. DHS did not address the cuts to that office when asked for comment.

The Transportation Security Administration has similarly struggled with its staffing levels, though not by the administration’s design.

Few officials believe an attack similar in nature to the events of Sept. 11, 2001, could ever happen again given the dramatic changes to air travel, immigration vetting and collaboration between federal, state and local law enforcement agencies that were initiated in the years that followed.

But two government shutdowns in 2025 and 2026 — the latter over partisan disputes over ICE reforms — dealt a blow to TSA. More than 1,500 TSA officers left the department after going months without pay, increasing the difficulties associated with screening air travelers.

The agency is working to rehire staff, but new recruits need to clear government screening and receive training to adequately perform their work at the nation’s airports. That means that even a hiring blitz may not offer the agency immediate relief as it deals with the continued strains on its staffing nationwide.

Larger intel efforts under threat

DHS is far from the only section of the executive branch working to counter threats from terrorist groups or foreign adversaries. But the FBI and other intelligence community agencies have also been retasked.

As part of the Trump administration’s efforts to fine-tune government agencies that it claims strayed from their original missions under Biden’s leadership, it has refocused these agencies on clamping down on alleged left-wing extremist groups, including the ill-defined Antifa, and cartels — all in the name of combating foreign terrorist organizations.

The administration has shifted the National Counterterrorism Center away from its typical focus on traditional terrorist groups toward primarily fighting cartels, in line with the Trump administration’s efforts to designate cartels Foreign Terrorist Organizations. These changes have happened in tandem with staffing cuts at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Like DHS, ODNI and NCTC were created after the Sept. 11 attacks to address some of the bureaucratic problems that contributed to the inability of the U.S. government to detect the al-Qaida plot. Specifically, these organizations were created to improve intelligence-sharing and coordination between intelligence agencies.

ODNI, the FBI and others have also refocused some of their counterterrorism resources on immigration. Thousands of staffers and agents from the Justice Department, Pentagon and intelligence community are now working on deportations and border security. FBI agents, including those that specialize in counterterrorism, are helping apprehend unauthorized immigrants.

Democrats on the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee catalogued some of these problems in a July report, arguing that traditional counterterrorism capabilities were “basically eviscerated” as a result of these reallocations.

The FBI disagrees. It argued in a statement that its “counterterrorism work is as successful as it ever has been.” Per the FBI, it has “disrupted” more than 1,000 terrorists and 55 foreign terrorist organizations and conducted more than 4,000 arrests related to “foreign terrorist organizations.”

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence did not respond to a request for comment.

Scrutiny could be coming

The Trump administration’s sweeping changes to DHS and these other agencies could come under scrutiny if Democrats retake control of Congress in November’s midterm elections.

Democratic lawmakers have signaled that investigating this reallocation of resources will be a priority.

Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), the top Democrat on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, sent letters to the Justice Department, DHS, ODNI, the State Department and the White House this week reminding them of their obligation to retain records associated with these staffing redirections — a sign Democrats may wish to hold hearings about these decisions in the next Congress.

“At a time when domestic and foreign terrorist threats remain elevated, we should be making sure our national security professionals have the tools and resources they need to identify and disrupt threats before they become attacks,” Peters said. “Instead, the administration is hollowing out our counterterrorism capabilities and undermining our ability to keep Americans safe.”

Maggie Miller contributed to this report.