The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) are failing to address the threat of domestic terrorism, predominantly from white supremacist and anti-government extremists, charged a Senate committee report released on Monday. The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee spent three years investigating domestic terrorism and the federal response, The Guardian reports. It found that the FBI and the DHS have “failed to systematically track and report data on domestic terrorism” and have not allocated sufficient resources to countering the threat. The report comes after a spate of racist shootings.
Both the FBI and the DHS have identified domestic terrorism, in particular white supremacist violence, as the “most persistent and lethal terrorist threat” to the U.S.
The federal government has continued to focus “disproportionately” on international terrorist threats, the panel found. “Despite this acknowledgement and multiple analyses, plans, and national strategies across multiple administrations, this investigation found that the federal government has continued to allocate resources disproportionately aligned to international terrorist threats over domestic terrorist threats,” the report said. The report added that the federal government “still fails to comprehensively track and report data on domestic terrorism despite a requirement from Congress to do so”. The Anti-Defamation League says there have been 333 “right-wing extremist-related killings” in the last 10 years, with 73 percent of those at the hands of white supremacists. Black Americans have increasingly found themselves the target of hate crimes. Between 2019 and 2020, hate crimes against Black Americans rose by 46 percent. Earlier this year, 57 historically Black colleges and houses of worship were targeted by bomb threats.