For several years, Republicans in Congress have been trying to cut Pentagon initiatives to fight extremism in the military. Those initiatives began after the 2021 Capitol insurrection, where the crowd included veterans and active duty troops.
Now, the incoming Trump administration is poised to end those anti-extremism efforts entirely.
In his Senate confirmation hearing, Pete Hegseth, the former Fox News host whom President Trump nominated for Secretary of Defense, was direct in his reply to a question from Nebraska Republican Kevin Cramer.
"Things like focusing on extremism, Senator, have created a climate inside our ranks that feel political when it hasn't ever been political," Hegseth said. "Those are the types of things that are going to change."
Hegseth’s hearing came two weeks after high-profile attacks in New Orleans and Las Vegas by men with military connections, and days after a wave of stories tied to the anniversary of the 2021 Capitol insurrection.
But Hegseth said extremism in the ranks isn’t a serious problem and efforts to fight it are a distraction for the military.
"It was a made-up bogeyman to begin with," he said.
The anti-extremism initiatives were started by President Biden's Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin. Austin ordered the entire military to briefly stand down for reflection and formed a working group that made recommendations on fighting extremism.
The service branches updated their rules to better define extremism, developed training to recognize and counter it, and created systems to report it.
But activists say those efforts have had limited effects that could be stalled or reversed.
"I do think we've lost momentum because of the politicization of the process, meaning the Pentagon has shied away from making this a centerpiece of its efforts in the last few years," said Heidi Beirich, a co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism.
Progress has been made, she said, on things like an improved system to screen out recruits who may be affiliated with extremist groups or crime gangs.
But Beirich says the Defense Department hasn’t been transparent enough for outsiders to get a sense of how much it really has done.
"The fact that those rules and regulations were put in place in those branches may have a lasting impact over time, but it's very hard to know, because we don't have data, and I just don't think the next four years are going to bode well for any kind of emphasis around this issue," she said.
Beirich noted that Hegseth has a long attacked anti-extremism efforts in the military.
"He's on record calling efforts to root out extremists a sham and a purge and part of a woke ideology," she said.
In his confirmation hearing, Hegseth cited a study - commissioned by the Pentagon and released in 2023 - that looked at military extremism.
"A hundred extremists were identified in the ranks of three million," he said.
That study concluded extremism was no more common among service members than civilians, and its authors cautioned Pentagon officials against overreach in trying to fight it.
But the Associated Press found the study relied on outdated data and misleading analysis.
Meanwhile, the Department of Defense has been funding another study by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland.
Its data goes back nearly 35 years, and in earlier decades the percentage of extremists with military backgrounds who commit ideologically-driven crimes was about the same as the percentage of civilians who did, said Michael Jensen, a senior researcher for the group.
"However, in recent years, and especially the last five years or so, we've seen that number approximately double to about 15 percent of the cases that we've been including in the data," Jensen said. "And that is true if you include or if you exclude individuals that participated in the January 6 attack on the Capitol building. So this appears to be a growing problem."
His team also also found military service was the strongest predictor that somebody would attempt a mass casualty attack … and also that they would be successful at it.
"We've seen the number of mass casualty attacks continually rise year after year in the United States," Jensen said.
Which means even if the assertions are true that extremism is less common among those with military backgrounds, it's almost beside the point if one person can cause large numbers of casualties.
Jensen describes extremism in the military as a low-numbers, high-impact problem.
"It's not true that every member of the military is an extremist in the making or is vulnerable to becoming an extremist, or that every case of extremist crime being committed in this country is someone with a military background," he said. "But what we need to really focus on is the impact of even a single case."
Jensen said people with military backgrounds tend to be effective recruiters for extremist groups and rise quickly into leadership roles. He also noted that high-profile attacks by extremists with military ties can damage the military’s reputation.
"There's perhaps a growing perception among some people that the military is really the cause of the problem here, that these individuals are a product of their environment in the military, and that the DoD is not doing enough," he said. "That perception of the military can hurt the military's recruiting efforts. It can hurt unit cohesion. It can hurt morale."
His group's data show about 85 percent of extremist criminals with military ties are veterans, not active duty troops. So it has recommended the Pentagon not only improve its efforts to fight extremism in the ranks, but also boost efforts to educate troops about how to avoid getting involved in extremism after they leave the service.
For now, several initiatives are still under way in the military, and the Pentagon Inspector General’s office is evaluating the service branches' implementation of training to prevent extremist activity in the ranks.
This story was produced by the American Homefront Project, a public media collaboration that reports on American military life and veterans.
