Waning attention to international terrorism and other threats has former officials worried.

Twenty-five years after the 9/11 attacks, powerful agencies and vast legal authorities created to stop another terrorist catastrophe are being turned inward, with the Trump administration using many of those powers to round up immigrants, battle drug traffickers and target political dissent.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, birthed in response to pre-9/11 intelligence failures, has been central to President Donald Trump’s pushing of false election conspiracies and retribution against his perceived political enemies.

Trump has directed that Joint Terrorism Task Forces, which spread nationwide after 2001 to harness federal and local resources, investigate groups that challenge White House views on immigration, gender and religion. Another post-9/11 creation, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, has aggressively surveilled and rounded up immigrants on Trump’s watch, sometimes catching or killing U.S. citizens in its dragnet.

As memories of the worst terrorist attack in American history fade, former senior U.S. officials say the rapid remolding of agencies and laws created a quarter-century ago has contributed to a dimming focus on looming external threats. They cite not just anti-U.S. terrorism, which has ebbed but not disappeared, but a host of largely post-2001 challenges including advanced artificial intelligence, cyberthreats, drones and biotechnology.

Trump is dismantling or repurposing “almost all of the agencies that were created by the Bush administration to protect us from terrorism,” said John Bellinger III, who was President George W. Bush’s National Security Council legal adviser on Sept. 11, 2001, and helped craft the reforms that followed.

“There has been a tremendous loss of focus,” Bellinger said.

After al-Qaeda hijackers killed 2,977 people in New York, at the Pentagon and in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, the 9/11 Commission and other investigations found that the CIA and the FBI failed to share threat information that might have uncovered the plot. The biggest U.S. national security reorganization since the 1940s ensued.

A new Cabinet department — Homeland Security — was created along with agencies such as ICE and the Transportation Security Administration. The ODNI was created to ensure that spy agencies with different missions talked to one another. The National Counterterrorism Center would centralize terrorist threat data. The Justice Department established a new National Security Division in 2006 to marshal counterterrorism and intelligence resources.

Tools have been ‘exploited’

U.S. presidents were given broad new powers in the wake of the attacks. They included secret warrantless electronic surveillance programs — publicly revealed in 2005 — and an Authorization for Use of Military Force passed by Congress in September 2001 that was global in scope, had no sunset date and remains in force.

From the start, the “Global War on Terrorism” begun by Bush clashed with U.S. civil rights under both Republican and Democratic presidents.

The New York Police Department spied on American Muslims and mosques without evidence of wrongdoing. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden exposed an invasive global mass surveillance net. President Barack Obama’s Justice Department secretly seized reporters’ phone records. And Obama ordered a 2011 drone strike that assassinated a terrorist in Yemen who was also a U.S. citizen.

Yet Trump’s definition of terrorism is far different from his predecessors’. He has designated drug cartels as terrorist groups and used lethal military force dozens of times against alleged narco traffickers. Many former national security officials and legal experts say narcotrafficking does not fit the definition of terrorism because cartel members are motivated by money, not ideology, violence against civilians or overthrow of the U.S. government.

At home, Trump has targeted leftist groups, including the loose amalgamation of militant antifascism activists known as antifa, which he designated as a domestic terrorist group last year. The Treasury Department said it will pursue financial probes of left-wing groups, including any international support.

“We are mobilizing some of the same tools that we have deployed against terrorists abroad to confront this emerging threat here at home,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in July.

In June, eight protesters who were involved in violent anti-ICE demonstrations in Texas were sentenced to a combined 450 years in prison after being charged with “material support” to terrorists, a legal tool widely deployed after September 2001.

“One of the fears of civil libertarians from the beginning is that these powers and institutions would be turned against dissent. And that’s exactly what’s happened,” said Jameel Jaffer, an attorney who argued some of the major post-9/11 court cases on national security and civil liberties.

Tools initially justified on real national security grounds “very quickly … were repurposed or brought to bear against a much broader set of perceived threats,” Jaffer said. This was “normalized” under Bush, “extended” by Obama and is “now being fully exploited by Trump,” he said.

Julia Curlee, a former veteran CIA analyst, said that civil libertarians “might have had a point. But we also had a war to fight.”

Yet as terrorism threats have receded, “the civil liberties [arguments] are more persuasive to me,” said Curlee, who served as a director for intelligence programs in Trump’s White House until early last year.

“I think it’s concerning,” said Joe Kent, who resigned in March as director of the National Counterterrorism Center. Kent said he has told colleagues, “This thing that we’re building — imagine it in the hands of [a possible future Democratic] President Gavin Newsom.”

The NCTC scoured intelligence files for antifa’s overseas ties in Europe, Kent said. “I don’t recall finding any.”

Smaller agencies, inward focus

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence was created to solve urgent intelligence-sharing gaps revealed by the failure to connect dots that could have pointed spy agencies to the 9/11 plot. While Republicans and Democrats have urged cuts and other reforms at the ODNI, Trump in his second term has both shrunk the organization and bent it to partisan purposes, current and former officials said.

His first director of national intelligence in his second term, Tulsi Gabbard, fired professional analysts whose conclusions clashed with White House preferences. Gabbard used her post to selectively declassify snippets of intelligence to back Trump’s false claims that Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential contest was a “hoax” concocted by Democrats. Her temporary successor, Bill Pulte, used the office to support Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

Curlee said the ODNI, which has no direct role in spy operations, was long seen as a weak but relatively harmless organization. “Now we see what a weaponized DNI — how dangerous this entity could be,” she said.

The National Counterterrorism Center, housed within the ODNI, also has shrunk. It now devotes between a quarter and a third of its budget and personnel to countering narcotics, not international terrorism, former senior U.S. officials said.

Kent acknowledged counternarcotics represents “mission creep” from the NCTC’s original mission but said the terrorist designations of cartels was correct because of the number of Americans they have killed. But the administration, he said, aimed too broadly and should have focused on Mexican cartels pushing deadly drugs across the southern border.

While the budgets and personnel numbers are classified, the CIA also has pivoted resources away from foreign terrorism and other threats toward Trump’s priority of fighting narco traffickers.

The Justice Department’s National Security Division, which handles terrorism, counterespionage and weapons proliferation, has lost nearly 38 percent of its staff under Trump, according to records obtained by Reuters.

Among the government’s most vital tools for detecting terrorist plots, monitoring planned cyber hacks and eavesdropping on narco traffickers, U.S. officials say, is a successor to the Bush-era secret electronic surveillance program known as FISA Section 702. That intelligence stream will go dark in March if a divided Congress does not vote to reauthorize it.

Democrats, as well as some libertarian-minded Republicans, cite Trump’s broad use of national security tools as reasons for balking at reauthorizing the surveillance program.

‘Pedaling backwards quickly’

After two decades of U.S. counterterrorism wars, the core organizations of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State are largely destroyed, according to U.S. intelligence assessments. Those groups’ progeny in Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia appear mostly focused on local and regional targets for now.

But former U.S. counterterrorism officials question whether the shrunken U.S. counterterrorism net still has the ability to detect and dismantle potential threats from groups such as al-Shabab in East Africa or al-Qaeda’s Yemen branch, if they were to expand their capabilities and ambitions to target the United States homeland.

Then there’s the seven-month war Trump started with Iran, a nation with a known capacity for terrorist and cyberattacks. “We’ve taken a baseball bat to a hornets’ nest at the same time we’re poking holes in the screens that protect us. It wouldn’t surprise me if we got stung,” said Bellinger, the former NSC legal adviser.

Current and former officials say they are even more worried about a laundry list of threats that did not exist on 9/11: advanced artificial intelligence in the hands of an adversary, cheap lethal drones and weaponized synthetic biotechnology.

“The reforms adopted after September 11th have largely succeeded in their most fundamental purpose: helping prevent another terrorist attack of the magnitude of 9/11 on American soil,” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rick Crawford (R-Arkansas) said during an Aug. 31 visit by committee members to the Flight 93 National Memorial near Shanksville.

“We still face terrorism. We also face increasingly aggressive nation-state adversaries, sophisticated counterintelligence operations, foreign malign influence, economic warfare, rapidly advancing artificial intelligence, biotechnology, drones and autonomous systems, and threats to critical infrastructure,” Crawford said. “Many of those threats don’t fit neatly into the bureaucratic boxes our government created decades ago. Our adversaries understand that.”

Horrific and deadly as it was, the 9/11 attack occurred at finite locations across the United States, said former congresswoman Jane Harman (D-California), who helped shape the 2004 law that created ODNI. “This time, if we have a catastrophic cyberattack, and infrastructure goes down across the country … that will be harder to respond to,” she said. “And marshaling a bipartisan, effective response would be harder than it was a quarter-century ago.”

“We’re pedaling backwards quickly,” Harman said.

Nearly a third of the U.S. population was born after Sept. 11, 2001. “For those who don’t remember 9/11, they may learn about something that’s even worse,” she said.