ARGUMENT: COUNTERING DOMESTIC TERRORISMOne Year On: Marking Progress on Biden’s Counter-Domestic Terrorism Strategy

Early in the Biden administration, the president instructed the intelligence community to evaluate the domestic terrorist threat – and intelligence officials concluded that it’s severe. On 15 June 2021, the Biden administration released the National Strategy to Counter Domestic Terrorism.

Ryan B. Greer writes in Just Security that now that it has been a full year since the launch, there is an opportunity to review the administration’s progress made toward countering the threat of domestic violent extremism. He notes that the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), where he works, and the McCain Institute at Arizona State University held a Domestic Violent Extremism Policy Summit just before the strategy’s anniversary, at which senior administration officials spoke, the substance of their remarks was illustrative in explaining how the administration sees its progress.

As Greer wrote previously, the strategy had its limitations from the outset, but largely was an ambitious attempt to meet the need to address domestic terrorism through a comprehensive plan.

Pillar One: Understanding the Threat
The strategy consists of four pillars, the first of which is to commit the federal government to improve its understanding of the threat and share more information. While it is difficult to tell exactly how intelligence and information flow are carried out within the government, it seems safe to say that the administration has succeeded in increasing information sharing. 

Pillar Two: Prevention
The second pillar concerns prevention of recruitment and mobilization to violence. The government’s authorities for countering domestic terrorism – as opposed to taking action against FTOs – are, rightfully, far more narrow, to preserve Americans’ civil liberties. As such, prevention is significantly more important as a strategic line of effort to counter domestic threats. The strategy states that the administration would increase prevention resources and share information with the technology sector to inform platforms on radicalization methods.Some progress has been made. 

Pillar Three: Disrupting Threats
The third pillar of the strategy is focused on disrupting domestic terrorist plots, assessing whether new legislation is needed to counter the threat, and looking at insider threats within the government. The results of this pillar so far are mixed.

Pillar Four: Long-Term Contributors
The fourth pillar of the strategy aims to address systemic racism, bias in law enforcement, online conspiracies, and gun violence. In short, it is the pillar with long-term aims. It is both the pillar with the least obvious progress, but also the one where progress is perhaps the most elusive. Solving systemic racism, for example, is no small goal.

Greer concludes:

The administration has made a significant amount of progress to counter domestic terrorism. In fact, by most measures on most issues, the Biden administration has done more on countering domestic terrorism than most administrations do on any typical policy issues. Moreover, Congress deserves much of the blame for not rising to the challenge and working with the administration to significantly scale efforts.

However, the domestic terrorist threat is not a typical policy issue – it is an existential one; a threat to our very democracy and ability of communities to live without fear. On January 6th of this year, FBI Director Christopher Wray rightly observed that “the problem of domestic terrorism has been metastasizing across the country.” And yet, the administration has not created a new center – like the Bush administration worked with Congress to do with NCTC after 9/11 – nor created a Special Presidential Envoy – as President Obama did to advance the Global Coalition to Counter ISIS. Perhaps a new center or envoy are not the right mechanisms, but certainly, they are the right scale to address domestic terrorism, which by any measure is a significant national security threat, and one that is only getting more severe. While the administration’s progress is laudable, the bar for progress is, rightfully, incredibly high, and not yet met.