Coming changes at the state department follow pattern of moving resources away from programs that focus on preventing far-right violence Tess Owen Sat 24 May 2025 13.00 CEST Share US state department employees recently opened up their emails to find a PDF to their new “style guide”, which dictates what language and terminology they can and can’t use. According to this new updated guide, the term “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism”– “REMVE” or “RMVE” – was now banned, except in situations where they were legally compelled to use it. While style guide updates in government agencies that tinker with acronyms between administrations are not unusual, the document did not yet propose an alternative term for the threat from the violent far right. Current and former state department officials told the Guardian that this was just one reason why they are concerned about how seriously the Trump administration will take the ongoing threat from white supremacists at home and abroad. Over the last six years, the state department caught up to European partners by recognizing the transnational threat posed by the radical far right – after decades of laser focus on jihadist terrorism. In January, one week before Donald Trump returned to the White House, the state department took action against the white supremacist collective Terrorgram, designating it as a foreign terrorist organization and linking it to a shooting at an LGBTQ+ bar in Slovakia, a knife attack at a mosque in Turkey and a planned attack on energy facilities in New Jersey. It was the third “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremist” group to ever face terrorist designation or sanctions from the state department. First was the Russian Imperial Movement in 2020, and later the neo-Nazi Nordic Resistance in 2024. In addition to the new ban on using language to refer to the threat of white supremacists, last month Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, unveiled a plan for huge cuts at the state department, which would result in the elimination of more than a hundred offices and about 700 jobs – including those whose portfolios include racially motivated violent extremism. Among the offices on the chopping block is the Office for Countering Violent Extremism, or “CVE”, which works on identifying root causes of radicalization and extremism to prevent terrorist attacks before they happen. CVE began looking at international white supremacist terrorism around 2019. Now, that threat accounts for about a third of their work. Rubio said in his announcement of the plan that the current state department was “beholden to a radical political ideology”. The coming changes at the state department follow a pattern of moving resources away from programs that work on the threat of the far right since Trump took office. In March, the FBI scaled back an office that was focused on domestic extremism. The FBI’s joint terrorism taskforces, which investigated domestic and international terrorist threats, were redirected to assist in the president’s immigration enforcement operations. Meanwhile, offices at the Department of Homeland Security, similar to the state department’s CVE, which worked on threat prevention, including from the far right, have also seen cuts and funding for grants has been terminated.
via guardian: Trump administration is minimizing white supremacist threat, officials warn