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... The Trump administration's purge of US government workers has gutted a Department of Homeland Security unit created to combat online radicalisation and credited with helping disrupt more than 1,000 violent plots in the past few years, according to current and former officials.

Roughly 20% of probationary employees were dismissed or resigned from the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships (CP3) in recent weeks, according to two current officials and one former employee who requested anonymity because they weren't authorised to speak on the matter. The CP3 is the primary federal unit focused on proactively stopping extremist violence around the country.

Many of the recently departed workers helped state and local authorities through US$79 million (RM350.85 million) in federal grants aimed at keeping online threats from turning into real world attacks. Their work supported programmes to study the impact of online misinformation and radicalisation, educate police departments on how to prevent politically motivated violence and train school administrators to work with students at risk of being influenced to make racially motivated threats.

The immediate effect of the change, current officials said, will be to cut support to state efforts to create anti-domestic terrorism strategies. Those plans, which CP3 helps craft, typically provide guidance for law enforcement efforts to assess threats from homegrown violent extremist organisations, such as white supremacist groups or anti-government militias. Twelve states have lost their liaisons with CP3 as a result of the dismissals, according to the officials. ...