A school shooting database funded by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is the latest target of President Donald Trump’s attempts to downsize the government.
The research was part of the now-cancelled Terrorism and Targeted Violence Database, which tracked domestic terrorism.
The database “was the only publicly available source of information that allowed homeland security professionals, law enforcement, school administrators, prevention practitioners, and policymakers to analyze the scope and nature of terrorism and targeted violence in the United States,” according to the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland, College Park, which oversaw the project.
The short-lived project, which was developed in response to the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act, compiled the first-ever dataset that overlapped school-based targeted violence —- alongside other types of violence — with terrorism events.
It found that between 2023 and 2024, 400 out of more than 1,800 incidents targeted U.S. schools, leading to 81 successful attacks that occurred at educational institutions and took the lives of dozens of children.
The database showed that “there is a growing intersection of terrorism, hate crime (especially anti-Semitism), and school-based mass violence — something that state and local law enforcement are neither trained nor prepared to detect and counter,” according to a March 25 statement from START announcing the project’s cancellation. “It served as a critical resource for developing an evidence-based response to the contemporary threat.”
The cut was part of a broader $20 million slash in funding for 24 projects, according to The Washington Post.
Despite an overall increase in school shootings in recent years, school shooting and safety experts have lamented the lack of a federal database on the issue. They instead rely on various research databases compiled by universities, organizations or individuals, such as the Terrorism and Targeted Violence Database.
So far, Trump’s cuts have also eliminated over a billion dollars in grants for teacher training and education research and shuttered half of the U.S. Department of Education’s civil rights enforcement offices nationwide.
Earlier this month, the Trump administration’s efforts to decrease what the president calls "bureaucratic bloat” led to half the department's staff being laid off, raising concerns from civil rights organizations and Democrats over whether the department will be able to fulfill its required roles such as ensuring an equal access to education for all students.
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